Historians are fond of quoting L. P. Hartley’s famous line: “The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.” It is a helpful image that emphasizes the distance, remoteness, and inscrutability of the past. Visiting a country whose language you do not speak can be disorienting until you start deciphering the gestures, unlocking the meaning behind facial expressions, and picking apart the cultural practices natives take for granted. For many students, the past is equally disorienting, and to seek safe harbor they ignore differences to emphasize commonalities. “Those people in the past are just like me, except they wear funny clothes.” Stripped down, they do resemble us, but more often they encountered their world in radically different ways. Understanding these differences is what makes the study of history so compelling.

My goal in compiling Sources for America’s History is to help students encounter this different past in its most raw and visceral form. Designed to accompany America’s History, Eighth Edition, and America: A Concise History, Sixth Edition, the sources collected here put students in unmediated contact with those whose experiences shaped our past. Each chapter includes a variety of both obscure and well-known voices, whose testimony highlights key themes of the period. The sources in each chapter give competing perspectives on leading events and ideas. This purposeful tension between sources is not intended to frustrate the reader. Instead, the differing viewpoints introduce students to the challenge that historians face in sifting through the evidence left to us. How do we make sense of the large body of primary sources that we have related to America’s half millennium of lived experience?

Textbook authors present an argument about the past, something historians refer to as a “narrative.” Those arguments, of course, are based on historians’ interpretation and assessment of primary sources. This document collection makes its own argument based on the specific sources selected for inclusion, but invites debate by encouraging the reader to interpret sources in different ways. Sources for America’s History is designed to encourage a productive intellectual give-and-take, enabling students of history to offer their own perspective on the past. In this way, students join the ongoing discussion among the community of scholars seeking to understand the long and complex history of what became the United States.

To facilitate this effort, Sources for America’s History includes a number of key features. Each chapter in the collection includes five or six documents that support the periodization and themes of the corresponding parent text chapter. Every chapter begins with an introduction that situates the documents within their wider historical context. Individual documents follow, each accompanied by its own headnote and a set of Reading and Discussion Questions designed to help students practice historical thinking skills. The variety of readings, ranging from speeches and political cartoons by celebrated historical figures to personal letters and diary entries by ordinary people, offers students the opportunity to compare and contrast different types of documents. Each chapter concludes with Comparative Questions designed to encourage students to recognize connections between documents and relate the sources to larger historical themes. To further support the structure of the parent text, unique Part Document Sets at the end of every part section present five or six sources chosen specifically to illustrate the major themes and developments covered in each of the parent text’s nine thematic parts, allowing students to make even broader comparisons and connections across time and place.

Acknowledgments

As with any big undertaking, many hands helped craft the book you are holding. Thanks go to Rebecca Edwards from Vassar College, one of the lead authors of America’s History, for her confidence in me. Several instructors at the college, community college, and high school levels offered insightful suggestions based on their teaching experiences. They will see here many of the suggestions they recommended, though I could not accommodate all of the excellent ideas they shared. Particular thanks go to Matthew Babcock, University of North Texas at Dallas; Edwin Benson, North Harford High School; Christine Bond-Curtright, Edmond Memorial High School; Kyle T. Bulthuis, Utah State University; Jennifer Castillo, Denver School of the Arts; William Decker, Anderson Preparatory Academy; Angela Dormiani, ASTEC Charter High School; Donald W. Maxwell, Indiana State University; Neil Prendergast, University of Washington–Stevens Point; Erica Ryan, Rider University; Paul Rykken, Black River Falls High School; Sheila L. Skemp, University of Mississippi; Michael Smith, San Gorgonio High School; Geoffrey Stewart, University of Western Ontario; John Struck, Floyd Central High School; and Felicia Viator, San Francisco State University.

My editor, Robin Soule, kept me focused while tutoring me through my first experience of textbook publishing. Her improvements on the text make me sound smarter than I really am. The following colleagues at Bedford/St. Martin’s helped in innumerable ways, most of which occurred silently and behind the scenes: Bill Lombardo, Sandi McGuire, Laura Arcari, Jen Jovin, and Victoria Royal. Thanks also to Andrea Cava, and especially to Nancy Benjamin, who oversaw the copyediting and saved countless embarrassments. Her contribution reminds me to practice a bit of humility next time I am grading my own students’ papers.

My colleagues in the history department at the State University of New York, College at Cortland, have always provided an intellectually enriching environment in which to work and live. Special thanks go to my wife, Laura Gathagan, a medieval historian who resisted the temptation to smirk at the efforts of a nineteenth-century U.S. historian to write intelligibly about the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. In the middle of this long process, she began calling herself the “Bedford widow” for the many evenings she spent alone while I toiled away. Finally, to my boys, William and Alexander: Daddy’s done. Let’s go play ball.