Fall 1996:  Chair Barbara Traister asks Prof. Gallagher to be Lehigh's Epiphany Project coordinator.

Spring 1997:  Gallagher and Janet Wright Starner collaborate with five other graduate students on "Composition with Computers."

Summer 1997:  Gallagher attends Cindy Selfe's Computers in Writing-Intensive Classrooms workshop at Michigan Tech for his first immersion in computer pedagogy.

Fall 1997:  Gallagher first experiments with student web projects.

Summer 1998:  Gallagher's general interest in student archive projects is piqued at Randy Bass's American Studies Crossroads Project workshop at Georgetown.

Spring 1999:  Teaching Fellow Stephen Tompkins presides over a weekly film and discussion session of Gallagher's upper-division Early American Literature course at the same time that Gallagher is continuing to experiment with student computer projects in that class and in a freshman seminar.  The marriage of films about American history and computer projects is made.

Summer 1999:  The specific Reel American History project is incubated when Gallagher attends the New Media Classroom workshop directed by Tracey Weis and Bret Eynon at Millersville University.

Fall 1999:  Reel American History is born with twelve projects from a senior seminar entitled Film and American History. Teaching Fellow Anthony C. Bleach designs the site, and he and Tompkins act as continuing "web dudes."

Spring 2000:  Gallagher uses James Clewley's Woodstock project on the site as a unit in his first-year writing course, and fifteen student essays are linked to Clewley's scene log.

Spring 2000:  Seven more projects are added from Gallagher's Early American literature graduate seminar, bringing the total to nineteen films on the site.

Summer 2000:  Gallagher joins the Randy Bass and Bret Eynon Visible Knowledge Project at Georgetown.

Spring 2001:  Gallagher's upper-division Early American literature class uses a half-dozen existing projects on the site as "texts," several authors of those sites do guest appearances in the class, and the students add a second-generation layer of material -- especially self-made audio and video segments for the first time.  Teaching Fellows Nathaniel Eastman and Vicki Rea are in the class and make important contributions.

Spring 2001:  An independent study project brings the total number of films on the site to 20.

Spring 2001:  Outreach begins.  Gallagher makes three conference presentations on RAH: at the Society of Early Americanists, at the Pennsylvania English Association, and at the American Literature Association.

Summer 2001:  Five more projects are added from a "Reel American History" class (the first time the name is used for a course), bringing the total to twenty-five films on the site.

Summer 2001:  Prof Gloria Dickinson of the College of New Jersey, a member of the Visible Knowledge Project, has her students do two projects modeled on RAH, our first linking to projects outside Lehigh, bringing the total to twenty-seven films represented on the site.

Summer 2001:  As a result of contact made at the SEA conference, a graduate student from Miami (Ohio) contributes an essay.

Summer 2001:  Nathaniel Eastman, our second webmaster, substantially redesigns the appearance and navigation of the entire site.

Fall 2001:  The American Studies Program at the University of Virginia adds a link to RAH on its Electronic Classroom/Best Practices page.

Spring 2002:  The journal Film and History accepts an article by Gallagher ("Reel American History: An Archive Built by Novices") to appear in its 32.2 (2002) issue and links to RAH from its web site.

Summer 2002:  The History Matters web site at George Mason University adds RAH to its "Students as Historians" section.

Fall 2002:  Steven Mintz includes RAH in a "brief list of online resources useful in teaching American history" appended to his inaugural essay in an H-Net series on Teaching and Technology.

Fall 2002:  Students in Gallagher's upper-division Early American Literature course ("First Contact: Then and Now") work from the site and add a third-generation layering of material to some of the projects.

Spring 2003:  Students in a senior seminar add two more projects, bringing the total to twenty-nine, and layer material on The Killing Fields site.  The author of that site, Wendy Kuhn ('00), is the first alumni to reflect on her work and the additions to it.