Who Built America? From the Centennial Celebration of 1876 to the Great War of 1914

"We get to have a favorite, right? This is it. Once in a while something comes on the market that's so well designed that it looks new but feels familiar; we're not sure how it works but we know just how to find out. Who Built America? is one of those inventions, and what it fits so intuitively is the inquiring mind. It's familiar because the look and feel of the original text haven't been lost: it's still a history book. It's groundbreaking because instead of simply swallowing the printed page as 'truth,' we can check out for ourselves how the text was woven from the threads of actual events. How? By accessing some of the thousands of original source documents -- audio, video, and text -- assembled by the indefatigable authors for this CD-ROM (along with graphs, charts, games, and quizzes). It's a whole new way to study history, and the chance to engage firsthand in the process totally grabs us.

Because we're history wonks? Hardly. Because of the scholarship and the intelligent design, yes, but also because of the immediacy of the experience. It's one thing to read about the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire of 1911, but when we hear Ida Seltzer talk about working conditions in the sweatshops, or see photographs of young women's bodies laid out on the sidewalk, we're there. Imagine not just reading about the invention of cinema but seeing the first film narrative, The Great Train Robbery, in its entirety. Black Elk's recollection of the massacre of Wounded Knee is here, as are Chinese immigrant Lee Chew's account of life as a launderer and merchant on both coasts, Julia Nelson's musical rebuttal to the charge that the act of voting would strip women of their feminine charms--and literally thousands more harrowing and inspiring documents, from Mormon farm women, gay cowboys, African-American 'peons,' Wobbly poets, and all the other workers and activists who shaped the United States. We've spent hours with this program and only touched the surface, and we can't wait to get back to it." -- from Voyager