The story of Asaph Perry

The story of Asaph Perry presented on this web site is an experiment in digital hypertext history. We designed the site to, in a sense, make Asaph's story not only knowable, but transparent.

The story is divided into six separate story lines. Each story line is comprised of multiple text blocks or lexia, which are stand-alone chunks of text as well as electronic links that join them. The links in lexia will take you to other parts of the story. This type of reading is non-linear, so if you prefer to read the story in linear fashion, you can start with the opening and follow the links highlighted next to the word "next" at the bottom of the lexia.

While reading the story you can also read about the development of the story by clicking on the "Writing" link on the left. Clicking the link titled "Learning" will allow you to read about how your students might learn about the past by engaging Asaph's story. The documents used to construct the story as well as an explanation of how these documents were used are available under the link title "Documenting."

An index of all the learning materials available on this site is available.

All the documents in the Asaph Perry Collection are also available.

The Asaph Perry Wiki (opens in new window) - Use this site to compose and edit new stories about Aspah Perry, his family, and world around him.

CLOSE

Learning the story

As narrative, the Perry story is normal in dimensions. In some small way we wish to exploit the simplicity of this story in order to consider the idea that the past can be understood as narrative or as a collection of intertwined stories, each with their own characters and plot, but also connected in important and permanent ways. As the Perry story unfolds we will suggest how the story and its narrative structure can be used to understand large and small ideas about the past. Some of these pedagogical prompts may simply extend the story, while others may require more sophisticated generalizations.

We will also explore how teachers and students might use the conclusions we have made or the documents we have provided to understand how history is constructed. We will pose alternative versions of some conclusions as examples of how we did our work, hoping that these examples might be used to prompt readers to develop their own alternate versions of the story. We will also pause in places to fill in context, if the story is too shallow. Overall our aim with this pedagogical thread is to provide teachers and students a running commentary on how we might all learn from the story and how we might intentionally use these resources or related resources to construct history.