Who Built America? includes a free online textbook, primary document repository, and teaching resource created by the American Social History Project/Center for Media and Learning at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. The textbook and supplemental resources survey the nation’s past from an important but often neglected perspective—the transformations wrought by the changing nature and forms of work, and the role that working people played in the making of modern America.
Who Built America? offers a thirty-chapter textbook accompanied by drawings, paintings, prints, cartoons, photographs, objects, and other visual media, including links to ASHP/CML’s ten documentary videos and teacher guides that supplement the book’s themes and narrative and offer perspectives on the past that were often not articulated in the written record. Each chapter includes first-person “Voices” from the past—excerpts from letters, diaries, autobiographies, poems, songs, journalism, fiction, official testimony, oral histories, and other historical documents—along with a timeline and suggestions for further reading.
This online edition features supplemental materials designed to help readers understand the practice of history. The more than forty A Closer Look essays, offer readers an in-depth investigation of a significant historical event, cultural phenomenon, or trend that is otherwise only touched upon in a chapter. The seven Historians Disagree essays provide readers with historiographic perspectives on how scholars’ approaches to key topics have changed over time, illuminating how history is an ever-evolving field of study.
The OER also includes the History Matters Repository, featuring more than 2,000 primary source resources from the History Matters: The U.S. Survey Course on the Web site. The items in this fully searchable repository contain contextual headnotes and links to related documents.
Chris Clark, Nancy Hewitt, Stephen Brier, Joshua Brown, David Jaffee, Ellen Noonan, Roy Rosenzweig, Nelson Lichtenstein, Annelise Orleck, Pennee Bender, Paul Ortiz, Anne Valk, Elizabeth Shermer, Vincent DiGirolamo, Julian Ehsan, Naomi Fisher, Rohma Khan, Allison Lange, Heather Lee, Gretchen Long, Peter Mabli, Manuel R. Rodríguez, Evan Rothman, Martha Sandweiss, Susan Schulten, Sandra Slater, Nate Sleeter, Carli Snyder, Karen Sotiropoulos, Donna Thompson Ray, Lori J. Daggar, Gregoy P. Downs, Elise A. Mitchell, David Parson, Kim Phillips-Fein, Naoko Shibusawa
