Hail to the chief

Quickly, now: “Who was the first American president who was not born a British subject?”

Unless you’re a U.S. history major or a trivia geek, you probably didn’t have that fact at your fingertips. But now, with AmericanPresident.org, you do.

For the past three years, U.Va.’s Miller Center of Public Affairs has hosted the Web site, packed with information about American presidents and the history of their presidencies. Launched as a companion to the 2000 PBS television series, “The American President,” the Web site was donated to the Miller Center in 2001 by the series’ sponsor, New York Life.

Since then, the Miller Center has dramatically expanded and improved the site, according to Garth Wermter, the center’s director of technology.

The site now has more than 60,000 pages, and has received over 660,000 visitors in the past six months. The secret of its success? Wermter and Executive Editor Marc Selverstone, a historian with the Miller Center’s Presidential Recordings Program, teamed with a group of consulting editors comprised of leading academic historians and political scientists to add a wealth of new material to the site. “Essentially, our editorial board is a Who’s Who of American historians,” Wermter said.

The consulting academics sifted through the existing material to identify errors and suggest new materials. Selverstone then worked with two graduate students who rewrote many of the site’s original presidents’ biographies, a process that took two years.

Seven biographies remain to be redone, but Wermter expects to have them all in hand by the end of this year.

The site is more than just a Who’s Who of the American presidency. Philip Zelikow, Miller Center director, envisioned a site that would help the American public better understand its government.

The first part of the site is historical, “The Presidency in History,” built around the biographies, but with new elements -- timelines of the key events of each presidency, a description of each president’s administrative structure, and the inclusion of multimedia elements from the Miller Center’s extensive archives, such as photographs, audiotapes and videotapes. The Miller Center also is tapping the University Library and other U.Va.-based resources to make primary sources available online through the Web site.

The second part of the site is political science, “The Presidency in Action,” which covers several areas of presidential responsibility and includes information on foreign policy, domestic policy, economic policy, legislative affairs and presidential politics. The Miller Center team contacted some of the country’s top political scientists and asked them to write essays on these topics, which are now part of the site. Wermter sees the history Web site as targeted to high school and college students, while the political site is expected to appeal more to government agency employees, the press and members of the public who want to know how their government works.

The Miller Center is certainly not alone in posting online information on the American presidency -- other organizations that have done so include the Congressional Quarterly and WhiteHouse.gov -- but none offers either the depth or the unbiased outlook of AmericanPresident.org, Wermter said.

Now the project is set to expand again.

In recent weeks, the Miller Center received a $577,500 matching grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. The center now needs to raise $1.7 million to reach its goal of $2.2 million, which will allow it to endow the third part of the AmericanPresident.org project, “Teaching the Presidency.” This project fits into the Miller Center’s ongoing $39 million campaign, which began earlier this year.

Beginning in the summer of 2008, teachers, scholars and education professionals will gather for week-long summer “Presidential Institutes” to explore various aspects of American history and the American presidency, and design, together, teaching modules allowing them to take what they learn back home. They would also post the curricular materials online to allow others who do not attend the institutes to benefit.

The Miller Center’s work continues, but there’s plenty of good information already available on the center’s Web site, such as the answer to the question above: Martin Van Buren.