Exploring American Histories is a new kind of U.S. history survey text. Unique among textbooks, its innovative format makes a broad and diverse American history accessible to a new generation of students and instructors interested in a more active learning and teaching style. To accomplish this, our book joins an inclusive yet brief narrative text with an integrated documents reader; together, these two elements create unsurpassed opportunities for exploring American history in ways best suited for the twenty-first-century classroom.

Format

Our extensive experience teaching American history in a wide variety of classrooms has led us to conclude that students learn history most effectively when they read historical narrative in conjunction with primary sources. Sources bring the past to life in ways that narrative alone cannot, while narrative offers the necessary framework, context, and chronology that documents by themselves do not typically provide. We believe that the most engaging entry to the past starts with individuals and how people in their daily lives connect to larger political, economic, cultural, and international developments. This approach makes the history relevant and memorable. The available textbooks left us unsatisfied, compelling us to assign additional books, readers, and documents we found on the Web. However, these supplementary texts raised costs for our students, and too often students had difficulty seeing how the different readings related to one another. Simply remembering what materials to bring to class became too unwieldy. So we decided to write our own book.

For Exploring American Histories, we sought to reconceive the relationship of the textbook and reader to create a mutually supportive set of course materials designed to help our students appreciate the diversity of America’s history, to help instructors teach that primary sources are the building blocks of historical interpretation, and to encourage students to see that every past event can and should be considered from multiple perspectives. The people of the past experienced the events of their lifetimes in a variety of ways and from multiple vantage points, and historians debate continually among themselves and the general public about what actually happened and why it matters for us today. Consequently, there is no one story about the past; there are many stories, and so we wanted to emphasize these plural Histories in the book’s title. Indeed, on the last day of our own survey classes, we measure our success by how well our students can demonstrate that they understand this rich complexity that is central to the discipline, and whether they can put the multiple stories they have come to understand into the context of the larger whole. Instructors at all types of schools share our goal, and we hope that Exploring American Histories will help them enrich their students’ understanding of events of the past.

For Exploring American Histories, we have selected an extensive and diverse array of primary-source materials that highlight multiple perspectives, and we have integrated them at key points as teaching moments within the narrative text. Each chapter contains numerous featured primary sources with a distinctive pedagogy designed to help students make connections between the documents and the text’s big themes. Every document is clearly cross-referenced within the narrative so that students can easily incorporate them into their reading as well as reflect on our interpretation. A specially selected set of interrelated documents placed at the end of each chapter addresses an important historical question related to the chapter.

Exploring American Histories also opens up a new dimension to the familiar textbook format by expanding beyond its printed pages to grant students and teachers access to a wealth of online tools and resources built specifically for our text to enhance reading comprehension and promote in-depth study. Of special note, every chapter includes an additional document set that instructors can order packaged with the book; each set of documents focuses on a particular theme and is available only online. Many of these projects incorporate multimedia sources such as audio and video files that until recently were unavailable to work with in class. In addition, Exploring American Histories features LearningCurve, an easy-to-assign adaptive learning tool that helps students rehearse the material in the narrative so that they come to class better prepared. Students receive access to LearningCurve, described more fully below, when they purchase a new copy of the book. And because textbook prices are a big concern, our “two-in-one” survey text—a combination of brief narrative plus reader—offers attractive cost savings for students.

Approach

During the last thirty years, scholarship in history has transformed our vision of the past, most notably by dramatically increasing the range of people historians study, and thus deepening and complicating traditional understandings of change over time. Creating a story of the past was easier to do when it was limited to the study of great white men engaged in national politics and high-level diplomacy, but it was also stunted in its explanatory power and disconnected from the life experiences of nearly all our students. Over the last several decades, the historical profession itself has made huge strides in becoming more inclusive in membership, with teachers and scholars increasingly reflecting the diverse face of America. The range of new research has been vast, with a special focus on gender, race, ethnicity, and class, and historians have produced landmark work in women’s history, African American history, American Indian history, and labor history.

All of these changes in the historical profession have greatly influenced how the American history survey course is taught in two fundamental ways. First, many instructors now try to help their students see that ordinary people, from all walks of life, can and do affect the course of historical change. Second, many historians have become increasingly transparent about their methodology and have a strong desire to teach their students that history is an interpretive discipline and open to multiple perspectives. Since the 1970s, survey textbooks have changed in coverage, organization, and pedagogy, but they have struggled to get it right—becoming overwhelming in their scope, difficult to read, and losing the sense of story that makes the past accessible, engaging, and comprehensible. As more instructors have embraced teaching with documents, they have come to see these shortcomings in the available survey textbooks. Along with many of our colleagues, we came to the same conclusion ourselves. Many current texts are too long, so we’ve made ours brief. Exploring American Histories is comprehensive, but with a carefully selected amount of detail that is more in tune with what instructors can realistically expect their students to remember. Many texts include some documents, but the balance between narrative (too much) and primary sources (too few) was off-kilter, so we have included more documents and integrated them in creative ways that help students make the necessary connections and that spur them to think critically. But the most innovative aspect of Exploring American Histories, and what makes it a true alternative, is that its format introduces a unique textbook structure organized around the broad theme of diversity.

Diversity as a theme works in Exploring American Histories in several ways. First, diversity supports our presentation of an inclusive historical narrative, one that recognizes the American past as a series of interwoven stories made by a multiplicity of historical actors. We do this within a strong national framework that allows our readers to see how the various stories fit together and to understand why they matter. Our narrative is complemented by a wide variety of documents that challenge students to consider multiple points of view. In chapter 4, students hear from both a woman accused of witchcraft and a minister who defended the Salem witch trials. In chapter 25, we ask our readers to contrast an idyllic, inviting depiction of 1950s suburbia with a racially restrictive covenant of the same period.

Second, our theme of diversity allows us to foreground the role of individual agency as we push readers to consider the reasons behind historical change. Each chapter opens with a pair of American Histories, biographies that showcase individuals who experienced and influenced events in a particular period, and then returns to them throughout the chapter to strengthen the connections and highlight their place in the bigger picture. These biographies cover both well-known Americans—such as Daniel Shays, Frederick Douglass, Andrew Carnegie, and Eleanor Roosevelt—and those who never gained fame or fortune—such as the activist Amy Kirby Post, organizer Luisa Moreno, and World War II internee Fred Korematsu. Introducing such a broad range of biographical subjects illuminates the many ways that individuals shaped and were shaped by historical events. This strategy also works to make visible throughout the chapter the intersections where history from the top down meets history from the bottom up and to connect social and political histories to their relationships with economic, cultural, and diplomatic developments. We work to show that events at the national level, shaped by elite political and economic leaders, have a direct impact on the lives of ordinary people; at the same time, we demonstrate that actions at the local level often have a significant influence on decisions made at the centers of national government and commerce. The discussions of the interrelationship among international, national, and local theaters and actors incorporate the pathbreaking scholarship of the last three decades, which has focused on gender, race, class, and ethnicity in North America and the United States, and on colonization, empire, and globalization in the larger world.

Primary Sources

The heart of Exploring American Histories is its primary sources, and in every chapter we supply students with numerous and carefully selected documents from which they can evaluate the text’s interpretations and construct their own versions of history. These firsthand accounts include maps, drawings, material artifacts, paintings, speeches, sermons, letters, diaries, memoirs, newspaper articles, political cartoons, laws, wills, court cases, petitions, advertisements, photographs, and blogs. In selecting documents, we have provided multiple perspectives on critical issues, including both well-known sources and those that are less familiar. But our choices were also influenced by the kinds of primary sources that exist. For some periods of American history and some topics, the available primary sources are limited and fragmentary. For other eras and issues, the sources are varied and abundant, indeed sometimes overwhelming, especially as we move into the twentieth century. In all time periods, some groups of Americans are far better represented in primary sources than others. Those who were wealthy, well educated, and politically powerful produced and preserved many sources about their lives. And their voices are well represented in this textbook. But we have also provided documents by American Indians, enslaved Africans, colonial women, rural residents, immigrants, working people, and young people. Moreover, the lives of those who left few sources of their own can often be illuminated by reading documents written by elites to see what information they yield, intentionally or unintentionally, about less well-documented groups.

Individual documents are embedded throughout every chapter and connected to the narrative text with Explore prompts, and within each chapter these documents are treated in the following three ways:

A Document Project at the end of every chapter is the capstone of our integrated primary-sources approach. Each Document Project is a collection of five or six documents focused on a critical issue central to that chapter. It is introduced by a brief overview and ends with interpretive questions that ask students to draw conclusions based on what they have learned in the chapter and read in the sources.

We understand that the instructor’s role is crucial in teaching students how to analyze primary-source materials and develop interpretations. Teachers can use the documents to encourage critical thinking and also to measure students’ understanding and assess their progress. The integration of the documents in the narrative should prompt students to read more closely than they usually do, as they will see more clearly the direct connection between the two. We have organized the documents to give instructors the flexibility to use them in many different ways—as in-class discussion prompts, for take-home writing assignments, and even as the basis for exam questions—and also in different combinations, as the documents throughout the chapter can be compared and contrasted with one another. An instructor’s manual for Exploring American Histories provides a wealth of creative suggestions for using the documents program effectively (see the Versions and Supplements description on pages xv–xviii for more information on all the available instructor resources).

More Help for Students

We know that students often need help making sense of their reading. As instructors, all of us have had students complain that they cannot figure out what’s important in the textbooks we assign. For many of our students, especially those just out of high school, their college history survey textbook is likely the most difficult book they have ever encountered. We understand the challenges that our students face, so in addition to the extensive document program, we have included the following pedagogical features designed to aid student learning:

In addition, the book includes access to LearningCurve, an online adaptive learning tool that promotes engaged reading and focused review. Cross-references at the end of every major section and chapter in the text prompt students to log in and rehearse their understanding of the material they have just read. Students move at their own pace and accumulate points as they go, giving the interaction a game-like feel. Feedback for incorrect responses explains why the answer is incorrect and directs students back to the text to review before they attempt to answer the question again. The end result is a better understanding of the key elements of the text. See the inside front cover for more details.

We imagine Exploring American Histories as a new kind of American history textbook, one that not only offers a strong, concise narrative but also challenges students to construct their own interpretations through primary-source analysis. We are thrilled that our hopes have come to fruition, and we believe that our textbook will provide a thought-provoking and highly useful foundation for every U.S. history survey course and will benefit students and faculty alike. The numerous opportunities provided for active learning will allow teachers to engage students in stimulating ways and help them experience the past in closer connection to the present. After all, active learning is the basis for active citizenship, and teaching the survey course is our chance as historians, whose work is highly specialized, to reach the greatest number of undergraduates. We hope not only to inspire the historical imaginations of those who will create the next generation of American histories but also to spur them to consider the issues of today in light of the stories of yesterday.