“History,” Mark Twain reputedly said, “doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme.” While Twain was not suggesting that the past was poetry or the lyrics of a song, he did recognize that historical events create echoes that continue to resonate into the present. To hear and decipher those sounds across the centuries, scholars and students must listen carefully to the chorus of voices that, taken together, provide a soundtrack of American histories. Of course, not all voices rhyme perfectly with other voices, and there are also harsh and dissonant voices. The document projects in this reader allow us to hear many different sounds as we seek to interpret particular moments in the American past.

This reader for the second editions of Exploring American Histories and Exploring American Histories, Value Edition, consists of a series of document projects each of which contains four or five documents of different types from different viewpoints focused on a particular event, issue, or development at key points in U.S. history. The document projects follow the chapter structure of Exploring American Histories and are styled like the projects in the full version of the textbook. The sources include maps, personal letters and diaries, memoirs, advertisements, posters, cartoons, government reports, speeches, trial testimony, song lyrics, and laws. The roster of historical figures represented in these sources includes well-known individuals and organizations as well as ordinary women and men. The document projects range, for example, from “Mapping America” to “Homefront Protest during the Civil War” in Volume 1 and from “Women in the West” to “The Environment and Federal Policy in the Twenty-first Century” in Volume 2. The project on “Reconstruction in South Carolina” appears in both volumes. Each project includes a brief introduction and headnotes to the primary sources followed by five “Interpret the Evidence” questions and one or two “Put It in Context” questions. These questions encourage students to recognize connections among documents and relate the sources to larger historical themes. Students must also consider the range of sources, the quality of evidence in each source, and the relevance of that evidence to the questions and the larger context as they analyze the documents and build an interpretation.

The reader is available in both print and electronic formats and is built into the LaunchPad for Exploring American Histories so that you and your students can access the documents wherever and whenever it is convenient for you. If you choose to pair LaunchPad with your print books, students will have access to multiple-choice quizzes for the documents and our new “Thinking through Sources” pedagogy, which consists of two auto-graded activities at the end of each project that ask students to make supportable inferences and draw appropriate conclusions from sources with reference to a guiding question. “Thinking through Sources” culminates in a set of essay questions that build upon the historical arguments students developed in the auto-graded activities. It is through reading and analyzing the documents that students will begin, as Mark Twain might have put it, to hear the rhymes of the past in the present.