Legal notice and privacy
Who operates this site, how to reach them, and what the site does with data, stated at the level of detail at which it is actually true. Every claim about data below describes code you can read in this site's source.
Legal notice
Operator
Dr. Pantaleon Fassbender
16751 NE 5th Street
Williston, FL 32696
United States
Email: pantaleonfassbender@gmail.com
This site is a personal research project, operated and hosted in the United States by a private individual, and not on behalf of any institution, employer, publisher, church or state. There is no company behind it, and it carries no advertising and no sponsorship.
Responsible for the content of this site: Dr. Pantaleon Fassbender, at the address above.
Rights in the texts and images
Every text carried here is in the public domain, and each module names the printing it comes from. Almost all are works of the United States government (reports of the Army engineers and the Geological Survey, congressional documents, hearings and the Congressional Record, statutes, the public papers of the presidents, court decisions), which are not protected by copyright (17 U.S.C. § 105). Florida agency publications are used where the state claims no copyright; newspapers are used up to 1930, or later only where their rights are stated in the module. The compilation of the Ship Canal Authority (1936) was printed as a Senate document without a copyright notice. The plates are public-domain maps, prints and photographs, each named with its original on the Plates page.
The site's editions of the public-domain texts are dedicated to the public domain (CC0 1.0). Editorial matter (introductions, notes, the timeline and the plate captions) is published under CC BY 4.0. The code is under the MIT licence. The full statement is in the repository's LICENSES.md.
If you hold rights in anything shown here and consider its use to exceed what the law permits, write to the address above and it will be dealt with promptly.
Liability for links
Where this site links to external resources, their content is the responsibility of their respective operators. Links are checked when they are set; continuous monitoring without concrete evidence of a problem is not practicable, and any link will be removed promptly if such evidence appears.
No warranty
This is a research instrument offered free of charge and without warranty of any kind. The transcriptions were checked against the page images, but they, the dates and the notes can still be wrong. The limits are set out on the Sources page and in each module's editorial note. Verify anything you intend to publish against the printed sources.
Privacy notice
Who is responsible
This site is operated by the private individual named in the legal notice above. It is a personal research project, and no data from it is passed to any institution.
Because the site is reachable from the European Economic Area, this notice is written to satisfy the General Data Protection Regulation as well as United States law. Where the GDPR applies to a reader, the operator is the controller within the meaning of Article 4(7).
What this site is, technically
A set of static files: pages, a script, a stylesheet, the texts as data files, and images. There is no server-side program, no user account, no login, no form, no search box that sends anything anywhere, and no newsletter. The site sets no cookies and uses no analytics, tag manager, advertising, A/B-testing or session-recording service.
It loads nothing from third-party servers. The fonts are those already installed on your device, and every image and data file is served from this site itself. Opening any page of this site therefore contacts exactly one host: the one in your address bar.
Server logs
The site is hosted by Netlify. Like any web server, Netlify's infrastructure records the requests it serves, typically the IP address, time, the address requested, the status, the amount of data transferred, and the browser's user-agent and referrer strings. This is technically unavoidable in delivering a website and is the only collection of data about visitors that takes place. It is used to operate and secure the service, not to build profiles, and the operator of this site does not analyse it. Where the GDPR applies, the legal basis is Article 6(1)(f): the legitimate interest in delivering a functioning, secure website. Retention follows Netlify's own periods.
The site is operated and hosted in the United States. For readers in the European Economic Area this means their request data are processed outside the EEA, by the operator and by Netlify Inc. as hosting provider.
Nothing stored on your device
The site keeps nothing in your browser: no cookies, no local storage, no session storage.
What this site does not do
- No cookies, no local or session storage, no fingerprinting, no pixels, no beacons.
- No analytics of any kind, first-party or third-party.
- No profiles, no automated decision-making, no advertising.
- No sale of personal information, and no sharing of it for cross-context behavioural advertising.
- No third-party requests at all: nothing is loaded from any other host.
- No artificial-intelligence service is called by this site; nothing you do here is sent to one.
Rights of readers in the European Economic Area
Where the GDPR applies, you have the right of access (Art. 15), rectification (Art. 16), erasure (Art. 17), restriction of processing (Art. 18), data portability (Art. 20), and the right to object to processing based on legitimate interests (Art. 21). Requests go to the address in the legal notice. You also have the right to lodge a complaint with a supervisory authority under Article 77.
In practice the answer to most such requests is short: apart from the server logs described above, this site holds nothing about you.
No representative in the Union has been designated under Article 27. The operator relies on the exemption in Article 27(2)(a): the processing here is occasional, involves no large-scale processing of special categories of data, and is unlikely to result in a risk to the rights and freedoms of natural persons. If that assessment ever ceases to hold, a representative will be designated and named here.
Notice for California residents
This section is provided under the California Online Privacy Protection Act (CalOPPA, Cal. Bus. & Prof. Code §§ 22575–22579).
Categories of personally identifiable information collected. Internet or other network activity information, in the form of the server request logs described above (including IP address, browser type and pages requested). No name, postal address, email address, telephone number or other identifier is collected, because the site has no field in which to enter one.
Third parties with whom information is shared. The hosting provider (Netlify Inc.) only. No information is sold, rented or shared for marketing purposes.
Review and change of information. The site maintains no user accounts or stored profiles, so there is no record to review or amend.
Do Not Track. This site does not track its visitors over time or across third-party websites, and it therefore does not change its behaviour in response to a Do Not Track signal: there is no tracking to switch off. No third parties collect personally identifiable information about visitors' online activities on this site, because no third-party content is loaded.
Changes to this notice. Material changes will be posted on this page with a revised effective date below. The site has no mailing list through which to notify you individually.
Children
This is a scholarly research instrument addressed to adult readers. It is not directed to children, and it knowingly collects no information from them.
Changes
Effective 7 October 2026. Where this notice and the site's behaviour ever diverge, the notice is wrong and will be corrected: the description is meant to follow the code, not the other way round.