About the project

The years 2003-2008

Because of my personal health problems the project had a bit of a slow time in 2004 and 2005. Some of the ideas that were launched by my assistant Fokke van der Molen to make the whole project database-driven were not implemented. The main reason is the amount of work involved and a complete lack of assistants at that time. However, it was a good plan and maybe we can find the time to implement Fokke's ideas after all.

Ofcourse we were quite happy to add the new 2005 version of the Outline of American History to the project. There are some striking differences with earlier versions, but you can all find that out yourselves.

I have been constantly adding new documents to the site and probably will be for the rest of my days. One of the things I would like to shed some more light on is the relationship between the Netherlands and the USA, after all this project comes to you from a university located in Groningen, which is the most northern university of the Netherlands. One of the important documents we added to the project was the "Plakkaat van Verlatinghe" (the Act of Abjuration) with a good translation to modern English. This was the Act in which the insurgent Dutch declared their independence from the Spanish throne and has been quite influential on the writing of the US Declaration of Independence. There seem to have been copies or translations (or both) among the members of the Continental Congress, but it is very difficult to find good evidence of this. Still, there are quite number of mentions of the Dutch example in the debates over the new US constitution. Most of them terrified by the almost constant stalemate sitiuation between the Dutch legislative and the Dutch executive branch. Some claim that this is one of the reasons for the strong position of the president in the American government. I want to get deeper into these questions and hope to find more documents about our special relationship.

As some have noticed, we are slowly changing the layout of the site a bit and converting al files to the XHTML standard. The general increased resolution of computerscreens that are in use has also made us do some little alterations to the design. With the use of CSS (cascading stylesheets) we now are able to provide better printing facilities for the project, but these have not yet been implemented for all files in the project. It is a major undertaking and will take some time to do that without assistance.

In the last years I have been teaching in the American Studies department of our university and this has resulted in a couple of new essays for the project, some of them Bachelor's theses, some of them Master's theses. There are still a number waiting to be converted from plain text to the format of the project.

So, after fourteen years the project is still alive and doing rather well. Most Google-queries about American history produce results in which we are mentioned on the first page, so it seems that we are not doing so bad. (And that without the aid of numerous firms who offered to help us getting good Google-results!) There is an ever growing number of very good American History sites, but we still think that there is a place for this project. And judging by the amount of copying of our work on other sites - including our mistakes - we are providing a good service.