About this Site

If you want to contact me, write a message to Donna Campbell at campbelld@wsu.edu. Please tell me the following:

1. Your name and e-mail address (for replying)
2. If you're sending information to be posted, may I acknowledge you on the page? Example: "Thanks to NAME for [new links added to, recent updates to ] this page."  

Go to American Literature Site Update Weblog (http://donnamcampbell.org) or subscribe to RSS Feed (actually Atom XML feed) for Site Update Weblog to learn about changes and updates to this site (not this page). .

In the Fall 1999 MLA Newsletter, the MLA published its Minimal Guidelines for Authors of Web Pages (updated in 2004). This page is an attempt to provide information according to the MLA guidelines, which are indicated by the headings in bold letters. The following applies to all pages that originate from http://www.wsu.edu/~campbelld/index.html

Except as otherwise noted, I am the author, editor, and designer of the materials. I began putting course materials online in the spring of 1997, and the sites here have developed from that effort. 

Quotations from other authors are cited within the text of the pages. Some online response forms and other materials are adapted from information readily available on the web; information on the origins can be found in the HTML code of each one.

About me: I'm Donna Campbell, a tenured professor of English at Washington State University (formerly a tenured associate professor of English at Gonzaga University).

Institution or organization sponsoring the site: 
Gonzaga University generously hosted the site from 1997-2005.

Educational site. Because this is an informational, educational site, notices of books for sale, eBay auctions, and other commercial information cannot be posted. 

Nonprofit. I don't link to commercial sites, and I do not receive any compensation (from booksellers, referrals from other sites, grants, course release or additional salary, or any other sources) for hosting any of the pages at this site. All decisions about information to post are thus not influenced by external sources. 

The class pages, American Authors, Literary Movements, Timeline, and American Literature sites are sponsored by me as an associate professor of English at Washington State University. Decisions about what to include are solely my own.

The William Dean Howells Society site is sponsored by the William Dean Howells Society.

The Edith Wharton Society site is sponsored by the Edith Wharton Society.

The Stephen Crane Society site is sponsored by the Stephen Crane Society.

The SSAWW site is sponsored by the Society for the Study of American Women Writers. As of July 2016, I am no longer responsible for this site.

The Jack London Society Site is sponsored by the Jack London Society.

Decisions about what to post at these sites are made by members of the society involved and by me. 

Contact information: 

Contact information is provided on this page, and every page at the site has or will have a link to this page.  I've removed the direct e-mail links from the bottom of each page to try to cut down on the harvesting of addresses by spambots.

Many graphic elements here appear courtesy of other web sites.  Each graphic not scanned by me is accompanied by a statement of acknowledgment and a link back to the originating site.  Those wishing to use or copy the graphics should apply to the originating web site.

If any images on this site have been reproduced from copyrighted sources and the copyright holders would like them removed, please contact me immediately and I will remove them.

Pages here can be cited using MLA or other formats for electronic citations.  Those seeking copyright permission for quoted material should apply to the author.

You may quote the information here under fair use guidelines long as you cite it appropriately. You may not copy large pieces of it for any proprietary or for-profit uses (such as school sites that require a subscription, and so on), or represent my work as your own.

Many of the pages listed under Literary Movements have sample MLA citation formats included at the bottom of the page.

The MLA Guidelines about what defines its various categories (scholarly project, database, etc.) for citation purposes are vague, but I don't think this site qualifies as a scholarly database since it does not contain a large number of texts.  It is an educational site, however, rather than simply a personal one, so the suggested sample citations for the page reflect one of the possible ways to cite the information included here. 

Most sources are credited on individual pages. 

I don't link to Wikipedia since I can't vouch for those entries. Also, if you wanted to go there, you'd be there already.

Because the Timeline presents short items rather than a comprehensive essay on American history, its information is both brief and as factually correct as possible. It is obviously not meant to substitute for in-depth reading in primary documents or current scholarship. Like all of the pages here, the Timeline pages are a work in progress. My main sources for the timeline are these popular histories:

Arthur Schlesinger, Almanac of American History. This is the source for the population statistics for each page.

Samuel Eliot Morison, Oxford History of the American People

Howard Zinn, A People's History of the United States

Ronald Takaki, A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America

I also use other works (for example, almanacs, books on individual events, such as Jill Lepore's The Name of War, the pbs.org site, the Library of Congress's American Memory Home Page, or primary documents), but these are the main ones.  I try to cross-check the facts against at least two sources so that I am not reproducing anything without attribution that would extend beyond the realm of "general knowledge." 

Historians clearly differ in their interpretations of events, which is why I try to stick to brief factual accounts using unbiassed language (as far as such a thing is possible). Since the Timeline items are very brief and are based as far as possible on generally available facts, I haven't footnoted them, although links are usually supplied to sites with more information and more documentation. I also welcome corrections from those using the site.

Privacy. I used to have counters on these pages but removed them. I don't collect any information about visitors, period. I hope you find the pages useful--that's it.

Posting E-mail Addresses. The Queries pages post e-mail addresses only with the permission of those asking the questions; there is a check box on the query form for this.  If a query comes in that has the subject "Queries Page," I assume that it is intended to be published. For other queries, I ask permission first. 

The Directories for the author societies require written permission before any addresses are posted to them, thus protecting privacy.

Thank you for writing. Although I very much appreciate receiving them, I do not post comments or compliments sent in e-mail messages because I believe that to do so violates the correspondents' right to privacy. If you have comments or suggestions for improvements, please don't hesitate to write; I try to answer all e-mails.

Purpose. The purpose of all the American literature pages is to provide useful, interesting, advertising-free information on the subject and to provide links to the best information available for American literature from the earliest days through the 1920s.  For each author page, I try to provide links to all available works on the web, except when these have been gathered by some major site. Most author pages have bibliographies and some additional information. The Timeline pages provide brief statements (as factually correct as possible) about events in American history and literary history. 

Choosing links. Links are chosen and annotated on the basis of their usefulness to students and researchers.  These links don't usually include the collections of links set up by search engines.

Commercial sites. In general, I don't link to commercial OR educational sites unless they have a substantial amount of free and useful information. 

Subscription sites. Some excellent sites (such as HarpWeek or the Brown Women Writers' Project) are available by subscription only, and since they are prohibitively expensive for individuals unless a university subscribes to them, I don't link to them.  If your university subscribes already, you'll know this by going to the university's library page site. 

Graphics. I have deliberately kept the graphics to a minimum to allow for faster loading of the materials, and I have chosen not to include embedded sound files for the same reason.  There are very few moving or blinking images here, and there is no moving text. The site isn't as flashy as it might be, but its purpose is primarily to inform and only secondarily to entertain.

Metatags. Most pages have Title tags and Metatags as well as keywords for ease of searching.  The earliest pages (dating from 1997) may not have these, but most pages  have been updated several times since then. Some pages are archived in the Wayback Machine project.

Navigation bar. Each American literature page at the site also has a text-based navigation bar at the top that links to these four pages as well as to course pages and bibliographies.   The pages have a consistent design that should allow for maximum ease of use.

Acknowledgments for graphics and quotations are posted on the page where the materials appear.

Browser compatibility . All these pages are fairly low tech and should be viewable regardless of the browser you're using--Internet Explorer of whatever version, Firefox, Netscape, WebTv, Chrome, Opera, Safari, and so forth, with the possible exception of the text-only browser Lynx. I check them in IE and Firefox, but if you can't view them, please let me know and I'll do what I can to fix the problem.  The PowerPoint web presentations are viewable only in IE, but those are the only pages that require a special browser.

Plug-ins. These pages should be accessible without special plug-ins except as noted (for example, the sound file links on the Brief Timeline of American Literature, Music, and Movies pages.).

No embedded sound files. Although there are links to sound files (on the Timeline pages and also through external links), no embedded sound  files are used here. They can slow the transmission of the page; also, I find pages that automatically play sound files annoying.   One primary principle of this site is that loading pages should be a relatively fast process. 

Site updates weblog. I've set up the American Literature Site Updates weblog and will try to keep it current. there. This takes the place of the "what's new" or front pages of the author society sites.

No log of original versions. For most of these pages, it is not possible to recover the date of the original version. The date of the latest revision is posted on the bottom of every page.  Since MLA Citation Format for Electronic Documents requires only the date of the most recent update and the date of access, this information should be sufficient. 

Timing of updates. For the most part, pages are updated frequently, but the changes may be too minor to warrant notice of separate "editions" of the page.  There is no set schedule for updating pages; they are updated when I find useful information. I might update a page several times in one day but then not update it again for a few months. New information since the last update is signalled by a  or icon.

Archive notices:  These sites do not maintain archives of earlier versions of Web texts, since there are no documents here for which this would be appropriate.

The MLA recommends that lengthy texts be numbered by paragraph.  Texts at this site are typically short, so this recommendation is unnecessary here. 

Longer texts, such as the William Dean Howells novels at the WDHS site, are numbered according to the page numbers of the original edition, so they need not be numbered by paragraph.

Citation of information

MLA format. Information cited at this site typically follows standard MLA format. Bibliographies do not use hanging indents since it is difficult to format hanging indents on a web page. The bibliographies are gradually being converted to a hanging indent style through the magic of CSS.

The exception is the use of  - - - to indicate multiple works by the same author in some bibliographies; some bibliographies repeat the author's name instead in order to facilitate searching. I'll gradually convert these so that they all use the author's name instead of the dashes.

Accessibility

This site meets most of the Priority I checkpoints for the WWW Consortium Web Accessibility Initiative. (See Purpose.)  The only guideline I have knowingly violated is using tables for layout instead of simply for data. 

Text-only versions. I am working on text-only versions for the pages where the amount of content is greatest--the Timeline pages and the Literary Movements pages.  A few of the early Timeline pages are available in this version already, and more text-only versions will be made available as time permits.