PREFACE: Why This Book This Way?

Understanding the American Promise grew out of many conversations over the last decade among ourselves and with others about the teaching and learning of history. We knew that instructors wanted a U.S. history text that introduced students to overarching trends and developments but, at the same time, gave voice to the diverse people who have made American history. We also knew that instructors wanted a text demonstrating that history is a discipline rooted in debate and inquiry. At the same time, we knew that even though many students dutifully read their survey texts, they often come away overwhelmed and confused about what is most important to know. Because of the difficulty many students have understanding the most important concepts when they read a traditional U.S. survey text, a growing number of instructors thought that their students needed a brief text that did not overwhelm them with detail. Instructors also wanted a text that would help students focus as they read, keep their interest in the material, and encourage them to learn historical thinking skills. With these issues in mind, we took a hard look at the introductory course from a number of different directions. We reflected on the changes in our own classrooms, reviewed state-of-the-art scholarship on effective teaching, consulted learning experts and instructional designers, and talked to students and instructors about their needs. We talked to people who are teaching online and listened to instructors’ wish lists for time-saving support materials. Understanding the American Promise is a textbook designed to address these wide-ranging concerns.

With the third edition, we again combine a brief narrative with an innovative design and unique pedagogy orchestrated to work together to aid students’ understanding of the most important developments while also fostering students’ ability to think historically. A number of revisions and additions make the third edition an even better tool for this textbook designed for understanding. Because, like other instructors, we are eager to ensure students read and assimilate this rich material, the third edition of Understanding the American Promise comes with LearningCurve—an adaptive, game-like online learning tool that helps students master content. Also available, LaunchPad, a robust interactive e-Book built into its own course space, makes customizing and assigning the book and its resources easy and efficient. To learn more about the benefits of LearningCurve and LaunchPad, see the “Versions and Supplements” section on page xvii. [[LP x-ref: see the “Versions and Supplements” section.]]

An Inquiry-Based Model Designed for Understanding

We believe that Understanding the American Promise, by employing innovative pedagogy, helps students not only understand the book’s major developments but also begin to grasp the question-driven methodology that is at the heart of the historian’s craft. Each chapter begins with an opening question that drives students toward the overarching themes of the chapter, followed by a brief chapter introduction that identifies in simple, straightforward terms the most important events and people to be discussed. Section-opening headings expressed as questions and section-ending quick review questions further model the kinds of questions historians ask and help students engage in inquiry-based reading and understanding.

Chapter Study Guides Designed for Active Learning

At the core of Understanding the American Promise’s unique pedagogical features are the revised Chapter Study Guides that provide a carefully structured five-step process to help students build deep understanding of the chapter material. In Step One, students not only identify the chapter’s key terms but also explain why each matters. In Step Two, they begin to apply their understanding of the chapter material through activities that ask them to consider comparison, change over time, or cause and effect. Step Three helps students put it all together with analytical, synthetic questions. In Step Four, students are given the opportunity to explain in their own words with an active recitation exercise. Finally, Step Five asks students to make connections between the past and present day.

Visual Learning Aids

Throughout each chapter, a wide range of visual material keeps students’ attention and reinforces important concepts. Some narrative material has been moved into figures and tables to call out and organize certain concepts visually and provide an alternative mode of learning. Map activities in each chapter engage students in reading maps and making connections and thus enhance geographical literacy. In total, there are more than 165 maps in the book. A visual activity in each chapter reinforces the role of images as historical evidence. Many of the 250-plus images in the book are historical artifacts that underscore the importance of material culture.

Additional Pedagogical Features

The third edition includes several other helpful learning tools. The LearningCurve online adaptive activity is designed to prepare students for class by reinforcing their work reading the textbooks. Section-based chronologies of historical developments help students keep events in context as they read. Because students often have difficulty seeing the forest for the trees, innovative chapter locators at the foot of the page remind students of where they are in the chapter’s larger progression of events and concepts. New skills-based marginal questions that address each chapter’s major ideas appear throughout each chapter. Key terms highlighted in the text and then defined in the margins further remind students of what’s most important to know.

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, Native American battles, early examples of photojournalism, 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. Topics include “Enslavement by Marriage,” “The Nation’s First Formal Declaration of War,” “The Meaning of Freedom,” “The Final Push for Woman Suffrage,” and “Protecting Gay and Lesbian Rights.” These features are available both in print and online and 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. Not only can the short-answer questions be easily assigned from within LaunchPad, but multiple-choice questions are also available for assignment to measure comprehension and hold students accountable for their reading.

LaunchPad for Understanding 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, John C. Calhoun, Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, Mary Elizabeth Lease, William Jennings Bryan, Theodore Roosevelt, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, Huey P. Long, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman, Paul Robeson, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and more.

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. Understanding 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 Understanding the American Promise can assign the LearningCurve formative assessment activities. This online learning tool is popular with students because it helps them rehearse 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 also can be assigned at specific intervals as higher-stakes testing and thus provide another means for analyzing class performance.

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.

But one of the best benefits is that instructors using LaunchPad will find they have a number of assessment tools that allow them to see what it is their students do and don’t know and to measure student achievement all in one convenient space. For example, LaunchPad comes with LearningCurve—an adaptive learning tool that 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, but they also have the option to assign automatically graded multiple-choice questions for all of the book features.

With LaunchPad for Understanding 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. [[LP x-ref: see the “Versions and Supplements” section.]]

Acknowledgments

We gratefully acknowledge all of the helpful suggestions from those who have read or taught from the previous edition of Understanding the American Promise, and we hope that our many classroom collaborators will be pleased to see their influence in the third edition. In particular, we wish to thank the talented scholars and teachers who gave generously of their time and knowledge to review this book: Brittany Adams, Irvine Valley College; John Bradford Bowers, Pueblo Community College; Vincent A. Clark, Johnson County Community College; Jane Dabel, California State University–Long Beach; Diane Duray, Howard Community College; Michael J. Engle, Pueblo Community College; Keith A. Erekson, University of Texas–El Paso; Josh Fulton, Valley Community College; Jessica Gerard, Ozarks Technical Community College; Maegan Harrell, East Tennessee State University; Geoffrey R. Hunt, Community College of Aurora; Josh Lieser, MiraCosta College; Steven Lurenz, Mesa Community College; Jeffrey J. Malanson, Indiana University-Purdue University–Fort Wayne; Suzanne McCormack, Community College of Rhode Island; Tim Myers, Butler Community College; Marjorie Moss Nash, Alvin Community College; Brian D. Page, Edison State College; Jessica Patton, Tarrant County College; Ellen Rafshoon, Georgia Gwinnett College; Carmen Reys-Johnson, Northeast Lakeview College; Norman Rodriguez, John Wood Community College; Mark Roehrs, Lincoln Land Community College; George D. Salaita, Eastern Tennessee University; Nancy E. Shockley, Oakland Community College; Allen N. Smith Jr., Ivy Tech Community College; Adam M. Sowards, University of Idaho; Michael A. Sparks, Ivy Tech Community College; Danielle J. Swiontek, Santa Barbara City College; David Tegeder, University of Florida; David Toye, Northeast State Community College; Joseph Thurman, Jefferson College; Kirk Walton, Black Hawk College; Laura Westhoff, University of Missouri–St. Louis; and Adam Zucconi, West Virginia University.

A project as complex as this requires the talents of many individuals. First, we would like to acknowledge our families for their support, forbearance, and toleration of our textbook responsibilities. Naomi Kornhauser contributed her vast knowledge, tireless energy, and diligent research to make possible the useful and attractive illustration program. We would also like to thank the many people at Bedford/St. Martin’s and Macmillan Learning who have been crucial to this project. Thanks are due to Robin Soule, developmental editor; Edwin Hill, vice president; Michael Rosenberg, publisher; William J. Lombardo, senior executive editor for history; and Jane Knetzger, director of development for history, for their support and guidance. Thanks are also due to Heidi Hood, senior editor; Jennifer Jovin, media editor; Tess Fletcher, associate editor; Mary Posman, assistant editor; and Lexi DeConti, editorial assistant. For their imaginative and tireless efforts to promote the book, we want to thank history marketing manager Melissa Famiglietti and marketing assistant Morgan Ratner. With great skill and professionalism, senior production editor Kendra LeFleur pulled together the many pieces related to copyediting, design, and composition. Production manager Joe Ford oversaw the manufacturing of the book. Designer Jerilyn Bockorick, copy editor Lisa Wehrle, and proofreaders Arthur Johnson and Angela Morrison attended to the myriad details that help make the book shine. Leoni McVey provided an outstanding index. The covers for the book’s many versions were researched and designed by William Boardman. Media producer Michelle Camisa oversaw the timely and complex production of digital components of Understanding the American Promise.