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What is the best way to engage and teach students in their history survey course? From the beginning, The American Promise has been shaped by our firsthand knowledge that the survey course is one of the most difficult to teach and, for many, also the most difficult to take. From the outset we have met this challenge by providing a story students enjoy for its readability, clear chronology, and lively voices of ordinary Americans, and by providing a full-featured text that instructors prize for its full narrative with political backbone, abundant documents and features for analysis and discussion, and the overall support for teaching. We remain committed to making the book the most teachable and readable introductory American history text available.

With LaunchPad we have made meeting the challenges of the survey course a great deal easier by providing an intuitive, interactive e-Book and course space with a wealth of primary sources. Ready to assign as is with key assessment resources built into each chapter, LaunchPad can also be edited and customized as instructors’ imaginations and innovations dictate. Free when packaged with the print text, LaunchPad grants 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. LaunchPad is loaded with the full-color e-Book plus LearningCurve, an adaptive learning tool; the popular Reading the American Past primary documents collection; additional primary sources; special skills-based assessment activities; videos; chapter summative quizzes; and more.

What Makes The American Promise Special

Our experience as teachers and our frustrations with available textbooks inspired us to create a book that we could use effectively with our own students. Our knowledge of classroom realities has informed every aspect of each edition and version of The American Promise. We began with a clear chronological, political framework, as we have found that students need both the structure a political narrative provides and the insights gained from examining social and cultural experience. To write a comprehensive, balanced account of American history, we focus on the public arena—the place where politics intersects social and cultural developments—to show how Americans confronted the major issues of their day and created far-reaching historical change.

The unique approach of our narrative is reflected in our title, The American Promise. We emphasize human agency and demonstrate our conviction that the essence of America has been its promise. For millions, the nation has held out the promise of a better life, unfettered worship, equality before the law, representative government, democratic politics, and other freedoms seldom found elsewhere. But none of these promises has come with guarantees. Throughout the narrative we demonstrate how much of American history is a continuing struggle over the definition and realization of the nation’s promise.

To engage students in this American story and to portray fully the diversity of the American experience, we stitch into our narrative the voices of hundreds of contemporaries. We further animate this story with a vivid art and map program. Four visual activities and two map activities per chapter prompt students to think critically about what they see. To help students of all levels understand American history, we provide the best in primary sources and pedagogical aids. To help instructors teach important skills and evaluate student learning, we provide a rich assortment of assignments and assessments in both the print and LaunchPad formats. While this edition rests solidly on our original goals and premises, it breaks new ground in addressing the specific needs of today’s courses.

A New Skills Focus for the Special Features

For this revision we focused our attention on The American Promise’s acclaimed feature program by looking for ways to make the features more useful, skills-oriented assignments. In print, the features offer primary sources, visuals, essays, and discussion questions; in Launchpad, the feature program comes fully to life with both short-answer and multiple-choice questions that test students’ critical reading skills. Making Historical Arguments (formerly Historical Question) now offers active, skills-based activities that demonstrate to students how historians make and support historical arguments. Analyzing Historical Evidence (formerly Documenting the American Promise) then gives students the opportunity to practice the skills introduced in Making Historical Arguments through analysis of text and visual sources. Experiencing the American Promise (formerly Seeking the American Promise) offers essays that illuminate the stories of individuals who sought their dream in America, helping students evaluate to what extent individuals make history. Finally, an enhanced Beyond America’s Borders continues to offer students a global perspective on the narrative’s themes with essays that connect U.S. history to developments around the globe.

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Collectively these features provide a range of new topics and content that includes increased attention to white servant women and slave men in the seventeenth-century Chesapeake; a new focus on the weak opposition to the African slave trade in the eighteenth century; a nuanced look at urban workers’ standard of living in the Gilded Age; a spotlight on Franklin D. Roosevelt’s use of New Deal programs to rebuild the navy during the 1930s; an exploration of the federal government’s influence on the economy in the post–World War II years; a study of the impact of the Voting Rights Act; an in-depth look at the use of air power in Vietnam; an investigation of the loss of American manufacturing jobs in the twenty-first century; and much more.

Evaluation of Primary Sources

Primary sources form the heart of historical study, and we are pleased to offer the new Analyzing Historical Evidence feature, which asks students to use historical thinking skills to consider a range of documents. Each feature juxtaposes two to four primary documents to reveal varying perspectives on a topic or issue and to provide students with opportunities to build and practice their skills of historical interpretation. Because students are so attuned to visuals and instructors deeply value their usefulness as primary sources, we have included both text and visual sources in this new feature. Images, including artifacts of daily life in Chaco Canyon, paintings of the Battle of the Little Big Horn, a 1920s mouthwash advertisement, political cartoons, and more, show students how to mine visual documents for evidence about the past.

In Analyzing Historical Evidence, feature introductions and document headnotes contextualize the sources, and short-answer questions at the end of the feature promote critical thinking about primary sources. New topics have been added that are rich with human drama and include “Enslavement by Marriage” and “The Nation’s First Formal Declaration of War.” These features are available both in print and online, and they are easily assigned in LaunchPad, along with multiple-choice quizzes that measure student comprehension.

In addition, more than 150 documents in the accompanying collection Reading the American Past are available free to users who package the reader with the main print text, and they are automatically included in the LaunchPad e-Book. Multiple-choice questions are also available for assignment to measure comprehension and hold students accountable for their reading.

LaunchPad for The American Promise also comes with a collection of more than 135 additional primary sources that instructors can choose to assign. These sources include letters, memoirs, court records, government documents, and more, and they include items by or about such people as John Smith, William Penn, Anne Hutchinson, Jonathan Edwards, Mary Jemison, Black Hawk, Rebecca Neugin, John C. Calhoun, Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, Mary Elizabeth Lease, William Jennings Bryan, Rose Pastor Stokes, Theodore Roosevelt, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman, Paul Robeson, Ronald Reagan, and more.

To give students ample opportunity to practice thinking critically about primary source images, four pictures in each chapter include a special visual activity caption that reinforces this essential skill. One set of questions in these activities prompts analysis of the image, while a second set of questions helps students connect the images to main points in the narrative.

Distinctive Essay Features Practice Historical Thinking Skills

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To demonstrate and engage students in various methods of historical thinking, our Making Historical Arguments feature essays, which occur in every chapter, pose and interpret specific questions of continuing interest. We pair perennial favorites such as “Was the New United States a Christian Country?,” “How Often Were Slaves Whipped?,” “Was There a Sexual Revolution in the 1920s?,” and “Why Did the Allies Win World War II?,” with brand-new entries including “How Did Seventeenth-Century Colonists View Nature?” and “What Did African Americans Want from World War I, and What Did They Get?”

Short-answer questions at the end of the features prompt students to consider things such as evidence, beliefs and values, and cause and effect as they relate to the historical question at hand. Available both in print and online, these features can be easily assigned in LaunchPad, along with multiple-choice quizzes that measure student comprehension.

Helping Students Understand the Narrative

Every instructor knows it can be a challenge to get students to complete assigned readings, and then to fully understand what is important once they do the reading. The American Promise addresses these problems head-on with a suite of tools in LaunchPad that instructors can choose from.

To help students come to class prepared, instructors who adopt LaunchPad for The American Promise can assign the LearningCurve formative assessment activities. This online learning tool is popular with students because it helps them comprehend content at their own pace in a nonthreatening, game-like environment. LearningCurve is also popular with instructors because the reporting features allow them to track overall class trends and spot topics that are giving their students trouble so they can adjust their lectures and class activities.

Encouraging active reading is another means for making content memorable and highlighting what is truly important. To help students read actively and understand the central idea of the chapter, instructors who use LaunchPad can also assign Guided Reading Exercises. These exercises appear at the start of each chapter, prompting students to collect information to be used to answer a broad analytic question central to the chapter as a whole.

To further encourage students to read and fully assimilate the text as well as measure how well they do this, instructors can assign the multiple-choice summative quizzes in LaunchPad, where they are automatically graded. These secure tests not only encourage students to study the book, they can be assigned at specific intervals as higher-stakes testing and thus provide another means for analyzing class performance.

Another big challenge for survey instructors is meeting the needs of a range of students, particularly the students who need the most support. In addition to the formative assessment of LearningCurve, which adapts to the needs of students at any level, The American Promise offers a number of print and digital tools for the underprepared. Each chapter opener includes Content Learning Objectives to prepare students to read the chapter with purpose. Once into the heart of the chapter, students are reminded to think about main ideas through Review Questions placed at the end of every major section. Some students have trouble connecting events and ideas, particularly with special boxed features. To address this, we have added a set of Questions for Analysis to the end of each feature to help students understand the significance of the featured topic, its context, and how it might be viewed from different angles. These questions are also available in the print and LaunchPad versions of the book.

With this edition we also bring back two popular sets of end-of-chapter questions that help widen students’ focus as they consider what they have read. Making Connections questions ask students to think about broad developments within the chapter, while Linking to the Past questions cross-reference developments in earlier chapters, encouraging students to draw connections to the modern world and consider how the issues addressed in the chapter are still relevant today.

Helping Instructors Teach with Digital Resources

With requests for clear and transparent learning outcomes coming from all quarters and with students who bring increasingly diverse levels of skills to class, even veteran teachers can find preparing for today’s courses a trying matter. With LaunchPad we have reconceived the textbook as a suite of tools in multiple formats that allows each format to do what it does best to capture students’ interest and help instructors create meaningful lessons.

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But one of the best benefits is that instructors using LaunchPad have a number of assessment tools that allow them to see what it is their students do and don’t know and measure student achievement all in one convenient space. For example, LearningCurve, an adaptive learning tool that comes with LaunchPad, garners more than a 90 percent student satisfaction rate and helps students master book content. When LearningCurve is assigned, the grade book results show instructors where the entire class or individual students may be struggling, and this information in turn allows instructors to adjust lectures and course activities accordingly—a benefit not only for traditional classes but invaluable for hybrid, online, and newer “flipped” classes as well. In addition, not only can instructors assign all of the questions that appear in the print book and view the responses in the grade book, they have the option to assign automatically graded multiple-choice questions for all of the book features.

With LaunchPad for The American Promise we make the tough job of teaching simpler by providing everything instructors need in one convenient space so they can set and achieve the learning outcomes they desire. To learn more about the benefits of LearningCurve and LaunchPad, see the “Versions and Supplements” section on page xvii.