This project began in the spring of 1995, when I wrote School Integration in the United States as my final project for my tenth grade African history course. In the course of my research for that project, I discovered that there was very little material on school integration and related issues on the World Wide Web. Since the project was done entirely in HTML, I decided to make it publicly accessible so that students doing similar projects would not come away from the Web emptyhanded.
In my eleventh grade American history class, I wrote two research papers relating to African American history: A Hard Shove for a "Nation on the Brink:" The Impact of Dred Scott and With Little Deliberate Speed: School Integration in Prince George's County, Maryland. These were traditional research papers, not Web projects as School Integration had been, but I found a program to convert them from a word processing document to HTML, so I added them to School Integration in a "Related Papers" section.
Although I didn't take any history courses in twelfth grade, I spent a month researching the civil rights movement as my senior project. From this research I produced The Civil Rights Movement in America: 1955-1965, another Web project, although I never made it publicly available as I had with School Integration.
African American History is a combination of all of these smaller projects. I simply took the text from the other projects and made it into one unified Web site. The pages have a common look, pages from different projects are linked to each other, and the bibliography lists sources from all the projects. I also removed the images that were in the projects to avoid any copyright problems. Although the result is less visually appealing, it's also much faster loading, which I feel is important considering that many visitors are connecting over slower modem connections and that the really important part of the project is the text, not the images.
I hope to expand African American History to help fill in some of the gaps that currently exist in the timeline, but I hope that even in its not-quite-complete present form, it proves useful to other students. I welcome any and all feedback about the project; my email address is listed at the bottom of every page.