The American Yawp [Free History Textbook], Editors: Joseph Locke, University of Houston-Victoria and Ben Wright, Abraham Baldwin Agricultural College.
From the about page:
In an increasingly digital world in which pedagogical trends are de-emphasizing rote learning and professors are increasingly turning toward active-learning exercises, scholars are fleeing traditional textbooks. Yet for those that still yearn for the safe tether of a synthetic text, as either narrative backbone or occasional reference material, The American Yawp offers a free and online, collaboratively built, open American history textbook designed for college-level history courses. Unchecked by profit motives or business models, and free from for-profit educational organizations, The American Yawp is by scholars, for scholars. All contributors—experienced college-level instructors—volunteer their expertise to help democratize the American past for twenty-first century classrooms.
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The American Yawp constructs a coherent and accessible narrative from all the best of recent historical scholarship. Without losing sight of politics and power, it incorporates transnational perspectives, integrates diverse voices, recovers narratives of resistance, and explores the complex process of cultural creation. It looks for America in crowded slave cabins, bustling markets, congested tenements, and marbled halls. It navigates between maternity wards, prisons, streets, bars, and boardrooms. Whitman’s America, like ours, cut across the narrow boundaries that strangle many narratives. Balancing academic rigor with popular readability, The American Yawp offers a multi-layered, democratic alternative to the American past.
In “beta” now but worth your time to read, comment and possibly contribute. I skimmed to a couple of events that I remember quite clearly and I can’t say the text (yet) captures the tone of the time.
For example, the Chicago Police Riot in 1968 gets a bare two paragraphs in Chapter 27, The Sixties. In the same chapter, 1967, the long hot summer when the cities burned, was over in a sentence.
I am sure the author(s) of that chapter were trying to keep the text to some reasonable length and avoid the death by details I encountered in my college American history textbook so many years ago.
Still, given the wealth of materials online, written, audio, video, expanding the text and creating exploding sub-themes (topic maps anyone?) on particular subjects would vastly enhance this project.
PS: If you want a small flavor of what could be incorporated via hyperlinks, see: http://abbiehoffman.org/ and the documents, such as FBI documents, at that site.