Can you imagine reading an American history book that relates the importance of the 1876 Centennial Exhibition and then lets you `tour' the grounds, viewing the exhibit halls and entering the buildings? Have you ever read a book that allows you to navigate through the main text on the theme of your choice (e.g., women and work) by building a linked file of references? Have you ever used a textbook that lets you hear and see (via audio and video clips) historical figures like William Jennings Bryan, Booker T. Washington, Andrew Carnegie, as well as ordinary working people?

Well, just such a learning tool has been created by the American Social History Project team at Hunter College. Combining multimedia technology and social history scholarship (with its focus on ordinary people who live history - their beliefs, conduct, and changing social and economic conditions), Roy Rosenzweig, Steve Brier, and Josh Brown have given us a ground-breaking new electronic text, Who Built America?: From the Centennial Celebration of 1876 to the Great War of 1914. Based on their critically acclaimed two-volume work of the same title (Pantheon Books, 1989 and 1992), WBA utilizes Voyager's Expanded Books concept to deliver a CD-ROM program for the Apple Macintosh that includes an enormous wealth of primary and secondary resources - 45 minutes of film, four hours of audio, 60 graphs and charts, hundreds of high-resolution pictures, and thousands of pages of text.

At its introduction by Voyager in August 1993 at MacWorld in Boston, WBA generated so much excitement that 1,300 pre-publication orders were placed on-site. Aside from this early market enthusiasm, WBA has arrived on the scholarly scene as well, and will soon become an installation at the Engines of Change Exhibit in the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History.

WBA readers have many choices for interacting with the program. Using the traditional approach, they can follow the main text and read sequentially, clicking on railroad track icons that are encountered along the way. The tracks mark excursions into multimedia sources that provide alternate interpretations of a particular set of events, deeper coverage of the topic, or simply branch onto a new path that diverges from the main narrative. Another navigational alternative is to search the entire database for reference to a specific concept and to construct one's own unique path through the material. Other powerful tools include a richly detailed timeline for each year, a resource index that provides direct access to all of the documents and multi-media materials that supplement the text, a map of the U.S., a world map, and a facility for creating the reader's own private resource collection. Notes can be taken in the left margins or in a notebook, and pages and passages can be marked for future reference.

The official publication date of WBA was October 1993, and it was featured at the EDUCOM conference in Cincinnati in mid-October, as well as at a special event held at the CUNY Graduate Center in November, to introduce CUNY faculty to WBA.

-- Colette A. Wagner