Welcome to The Americanologist Launch Beta!

Dear friend, family member, fellow American,

I would like to invite you to check out my new website, The Americanologist, designed to support your “Love for your inner American.”  If you are receiving this email link to the blog, I am excited to introduce you as the first invited guests, or perhaps my “beta-testers” for the site.  I hope you find the content and links interesting and relevant, and that it functions correctly across all of the normal platforms – smartphone, tablet, or desktop.  As this is my first attempt at the “technology” thing, there may be glitches in your experience, I appreciate your feedback in helping me improve the site and its content.  I will share a few thoughts below on the format, the connections, and the upcoming goals for the site.

The full site is a combination of theme pages and an active set of blogs organized on their own page.  Each page is setup with a left margin jump menu, or in smartphone format, a bottom menu, where you can skip across the site easily.  The key pages are:

 Americulture- This is an organizing page, where content will be easy to access, with brief highlights on different blog topics, including a button link to the full blogs, covering book, music, and movie reviews.

Lamont’s War- This theme page is meant to organize updates on research and battlefield visits following the history of the 82nd Ohio Volunteer Infantry regiment, where my great-great grandfather served as an original 3-year man.  This will also include direct links to blogs, centered around completed and upcoming battlefield walks, important battle and national moments during the war, and the soldier’s experience in a unit that fought its way across 7 states over almost 4 years of duty.

WWJWD (What Would John Wayne Do)- This page will house content and links related to American popular culture, history, and myths.  The content will vary, and while John Wayne is the organizing pop culture icon, the reviews and commentary will include many other characters and actors (male and female) who have influenced the way America has been portrayed in popular culture, both at home and abroad.

Blog- most content will be added as individual blogs, then linked back to the thematic pages through ongoing buttons.  Instead of an archive, the blog page will hold them, but to review a particular thematic set, accessing the thematic page should allow a topical sort as well.

NerdWork- This page includes links to some of my academic work as available on open sites, as well as uploaded files.

Across the platform, I have setup quick access buttons (top right corner) for direct email contact to me at theamericanologist@gmail.com, and there is also a button to open your Spotify account so you can search for my Spotify playlists.  There are several public Playlists and they are listed in each thematic page or blog post for your access.  If you do not have a Spotify account, you can sign up for a free one and access my playlists too.   The playlists will evolve over time, and if you have recommendations for songs to add to a particular playlist on my account, I would love to hear them!

My plan is to add 2-3 blogs monthly on a timely basis across the themes, based upon key dates, current events, and historical anniversaries or issues, and as relevant content or commentary is appropriate.  My overall goal is for the site to be fun, informative, positive, and supportive of American ideals, memory, and stories. 

I hope that you will find this first version rollout as a positive step in the right direction, and if you could take the time to look it over, checking out all the pages, testing the links, and letting me know what you think about it with an email, I really appreciate it.  Also, please check out the playlists on Spotify if you can and give me ideas on any songs I may have missed.  Finally, if you know of anyone else that might like to check it out, please forward a link to them to one of my pages or my Spotify playlists and let them know they are invited to contact me by direct email through the button or through the contact page to give me their email, where I can include them on my email list for future postings.

Best,

Rex

theamericanologist@gmail.com