FDR4Freedoms

The world we live in today is Franklin Roosevelt's world,” Arthur Schlesinger Jr. wrote in Time magazine in 1998. FDR4Freedoms is the digital narrative component of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Four Freedoms State Park, located at the southern end of Roosevelt Island, between Manhattan and Queens in New York City. Both the park and the Web site were created by supporters of the Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute and are maintained by the Four Freedoms Conservancy. Within this context, Schlesinger's statement is certainly valid: it is Roosevelt's all the way down. For high school students, undergraduates, and nonhistorians seeking information about Roosevelt, FDR4Freedoms is an excellent resource. Most of the site's content is divided into four sections—“Becoming a Leader: Before the Presidency (1882–1933)”; “Hope, Recovery, Reform: The Great Depression and fdr's New Deal (1933–1939)”; “Four Freedoms: Preparing War, Envisioning Peace (1939–1941)”; and “Statesman and Commander in Chief: fdr in World War II (1941–1945).” Each section contains a varying number of historical essays—fifty-two in all—each then further subdivided, with a photograph or image used to illustrate each of the subsections. The total content runs easily into the tens of thousands of words. Visitors preferring an overview might be disappointed—though each of the four sections offers an “in brief” page with separate content, the “briefness” exists only in comparison to the whole. It is still a lot of content, but the designers anticipated the problem. If it is too much to read in one sitting, the essays can be downloaded as well-designed pdfs. If a visitor is on a mobile device, the narrative defaults to the “in brief” pages

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