Fantasy Projects: Writing Curricula Based on the Oxford History of the United States

I have many "fantasy projects" - projects that I would love to engage in given sufficient time and resources.  The first would be re-reading the Oxford History of the United States, and using that resource to write tightly but thoroughly contextualized two page essays on major questions in US history.  The Oxford History, although vast in scope and rigorous in scholarship, is also highly readable, extremely thoughtful, greatly respected... and contains essential contextual information for understanding history that is largely unavailable at the secondary school level.  

In a nutshell, I believe I can take twenty pages of rich contextual information from the Oxford History and re-write it in two enticing pages, at a secondary school level, in a way that few other resources have accomplished. 

I imagine it would take me a month to read and take notes on each volume, and another month to write perhaps twenty two page essays that would help students (and teachers) make sense of history.  Since I have the summer ahead of me, I've decided to test this timetable and to see what product I can create.  I've just started reading Empire of Liberty, and believe I'll be able to start publishing some prototype essays here in mid-July.  

Provocative example questions from the post-revolutionary era that Empire covers include: Why could only men with property vote?  Why did so many founding fathers own slaves?  How did the Revolution weaken slavery, and why was it subsequently reborn with a vengeance?  How could the revolutionaries talk of independence while supporting slavery?  The answers to these questions require analyzing historical contexts in which notions of property and liberty differ dramatically from our own.   Students and adults jump to assumptions about these questions all the time, reading their present understandings of these subjects into the past, in a psychological phenomena known as presentism. (I hope to post an essay on the subject of presentism here soon). 

These essays would be able to stand alone, allowing for easy integration into curricula, but would also link together, creating a cohesive whole.  They would offer the rich scholarship of the Oxford History - lots of contextualization, rich descriptions of causality - and translate that richness into a shortened version accessible to sixteen year old students.

(For a samples of how I've made academic research available in secondary school texts, see my posts Contextualizing the Buddhas Life, and Examining Prejudice in Ancient China, which were written for sixth graders.)