Strategy for American History Study

I realize that when I say I want to "learn American history and politics", I'm talking about a massive topic. So, I can't really learn it in anywhere close to its entirety. With this realistic expectation in mind, it would be wise for me to devise a strategy to go about learning American history along with any other topic of this nature, as I don't intend for this to be the only one.

Wikipedia is not the end, but it may be a start...

Yes, I know, "Wikipedia is not a source". But it's a damn good jumping off point! As a product of 13 years of pre-collegiate American education, I have had plenty of U.S. history classes, and so I know the general sequence of it. The pilgrims came, the colony grew, we seceded from the Brits, the country was founded, Manifest Destiny, the Civil War happened, the Reconstruction era, World War I, the Great Depression, World War II, the Civil Rights era, the Vietnam War, and then all the modern stuff... But obviously, there are some gaps in my knowledge and some missing themes to tie them all together. As such, I think reading through the Wikipedia page for the United States and its history (Wikipedia article) will be valuable in my pursuit.

Wide to narrow

Back when I took AP Language and Composition in high school, our teacher constantly reminded us of an approach to organizing our papers: broad to narrow. That is, present your ideas first in a broad fashion -- give a "hook" that grabs the reader's attention and summarizes, or at the very least introduces, the topic. After this "hook", provide all the details, the "narrow". I intend to mirror this approach in the process of learning about all these expansive topics. The Wikipedia page is the "broad", and the narrow will be all the literature I delve into to learn about the subtopics. For instance, say I want to learn more about the founding of the nation. The Wikipedia article will give me a general understanding of how it happened, but if I want to learn more about the Articles of Confederation, I'll probably want to at least skim through the actual document and then familiarize myself with at least two historians' accounting of it. Surely, some of these topics will warrant more research than others, and that is O.K. I'll note which topics I'm most interested in learning the most about soon, but even outside of those I am sure I'll come across topics that will warrant deeper investigation.

Documenting my studies

I would like to document my studies in an interactive timeline I'll publish on this site. I have yet to find any examples I'd like to draw inspiration from yet, but I do know I want to mimic the "vibe" that emanates from the famous HyperPhysics website, which presents a reasonably comprehensive map of the field of physics in a very 2000s fashion. For some reason, I love the concept of this, and I'd like to incorporate the essence of it somehow in this project, but with a modern touch.

What do I mean by the "vibe" and the "essence" of the website? For starters, I'd like to minimize the amount of Javascript, animations, and other funky stuff that just slows down the site and adds complexity to what could be very simple. Still, I'd like the project to be easily navigable and easy to learn from.

I can foresee this timeline extending beyond U.S. history. Perhaps I can add a functionality that let's you turn on and off different "contexts". For example, let's say you want to look at German history (assuming this is a topic I've explored) and American history on the timeline. Well, you can turn both of them on. If this is to happen, though, it'll be in the future. Right now, the priority is U.S. history.

Topics of interest

It is in part because of how interesting U.S. history is to me that I want to start this project. But, because it's so interesting, there is a ton of topics I want to focus on. Here they are, and, note, I may add to this list in the near future: