About

Introduction +

Who Built America? An Open Educational Resource is 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. This project was funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities (in a collaborative grant with the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, RRCHNM), The Ford Foundation, and the City University of New York Central Office of Library Services.

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. Not merely a documentation of the country’s presidents, politics, and wars, Who Built America? focuses on the fundamental social and economic conflicts that have shaped U.S. history while also challenging the notion that the vast majority of America’s citizens have always been united in a broad consensus about the nation’s basic values and shared in its extraordinary prosperity.

The original Who Built America? textbook grew out of and helped contribute to the 1970s effort to reinterpret American history from “the bottom up”—drawing on studies of workers, women, consumers, farmers, African Americans, and immigrants—that has helped transform our understanding of the past. The American Social History Project (ASHP) was founded in 1981 at the City University of New York by Herbert Gutman (a pioneer of what was then the “new social history”) and Stephen Brier to bring this history to the broadest possible audience. In addition to the three print editions of this textbook (published between 1989 and 2008), ASHP produced a wide range of accessible educational materials in print, video, and digital media (including 10 historical films and the History Matters website, and the two WBA? CD-ROMs, the latter two co-produced with the RRCHNM). This Open Educational Resource edition of Who Built America? brings all of these materials together into a reimagined version of an online textbook. Along with making these resources widely and freely available digitally, we hope the OER will encourage readers to explore a range of historical sources and form their own interpretations of the past. We continue to tackle controversial issues and offer perspectives that are sometimes critical of celebrated figures or dominant beliefs. We believe that readers would rather encounter a clearly stated perspective, even if they disagree with it, instead of reading bland platitudes about the nation’s past.

The two-volume textbook has been updated to include a new chapter (Volume II, Chapter 16) and a coda essay to bring its coverage to the 2020s. The earlier chapters remain largely unaltered with historical interpretations based on scholarship from the late twentieth century. However, since history does not remain static, we have added new essays that highlight more recent scholarly approaches and changing interpretations of many important topics.

Beyond these additions, we have made significant changes to some of the language and terminology that appears in the textbook. Whenever possible, we have attempted to use names that recognize the importance of groups and communities to determine how they will be known. Through controlling language, dominant groups may perpetrate violence upon other cultures; but resisting names imposed by outsiders can be a potent way for groups to reassert their presence and power.

The most extensive changes relate to the language used to describe the histories of enslaved people and members of historically marginalized groups within what is now the United States. For example, we have updated the names used to describe Native peoples in several ways. When we can, we describe members of Native nations using their nations’ names in their own language, such as Haudenosaunee rather than Iroquois, and Niimíipuu rather than Nez Perce. This practice provides greater historical accuracy and adds specificity instead of making generalizations. Because the names dictated by settlers continue to be familiar to many readers, those names often appear in parentheses after the correct name. The names of individuals also changed: rather than Pocahontas, we use Matoaka, her family name, and Crazy Horse is referred to as Tashunka Witko, his Lakota name. We hope these revisions make the text more accurate and a better reflection of the Native peoples whose experiences we describe. The changes extend beyond these examples of Native names and also include references to African Americans, Latinx, LGBTQ+ and other identity-based communities. This means that the textbook usage typically does not reflect the language that Americans would have used in the past: for instance, we have replaced historical references to “gay” communities with LGBTQ+, although that more inclusive term did not become widespread until recently.

These changes were informed by advice from scholars representing African American, Latinx, and Indigenous communities; in the case of Native nations, we also consulted materials distributed by the nations themselves. This process was both complex and necessary. However, we consider this a work-in-process, realizing that with such a large volume of materials, we may have mistakenly skipped specific incidents. Furthermore, we know that language and terminology will continue to evolve especially as the history profession strives to better represent the country’s diversity. We welcome your questions and feedback about this process and other matters related to the preparation of this resource.

What is In this OER +

This site includes the two volume textbook (broken into parts, chapters, and sections) 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, up to 1500 words in length, offer readers an in-depth investigation of a significant historical event, cultural phenomenon, or trend that is otherwise only touched upon in a chapter. Accompanied by a selection of historical evidence, including many images, they are intended to help readers become comfortable looking closely at historical documents and to understand how historians arrive at their understanding of events or ideas. The essays also introduce new scholarly interpretations and make connections between past and current events and issues. 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 more than 2000 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.

All of these resources can be organized into collections for teaching or presentation via the My WBA Collection tool. Please see the “How to Use” page for guidance on using the collection tool.

Authors, Editors and Acknowledgements +

Who Built America? Open Educational Resource is a result of an extensive collaborative effort involving the knowledge, talents, and skills of the large number of people, listed below, who contributed to the OER and its previous iterations as a textbook with accompanying multimedia materials and teacher guides over almost four decades of work.

Who Built America? / OER Volume One Authors and Editors

Chris Clark, University of Connecticut
Nancy Hewitt, Rutgers University
Stephen Brier, The Graduate Center, CUNY
Joshua Brown, The Graduate Center, CUNY
David Jaffee, Bard Graduate Center
Ellen Noonan, New York University

Who Built America? / OER Volume Two Authors and Editors

Roy Rosenzweig, George Mason University
Nelson Lichtenstein, University of California, Santa Barbara
Annelise Orleck, Dartmouth College
Stephen Brier, The Graduate Center, CUNY
Pennee Bender, The Graduate Center, CUNY
Joshua Brown, The Graduate Center, CUNY
David Jaffee, Bard Graduate Center
Ellen Noonan, New York University
Paul Ortiz, University of Florida
Anne Valk, The Graduate Center, CUNY
Elizabeth Shermer, Loyola University

Who Built America? / OER “A Closer Look” Authors

Pennee Bender, The Graduate Center, CUNY
Joshua Brown, The Graduate Center, CUNY
Vincent DiGirolamo, Baruch College, CUNY
Julian Ehsan, The Graduate Center, CUNY
Naomi Fisher, The Graduate Center, CUNY
Rohma Khan, University of California, Davis
Allison Lange, Wentworth Institute of Technology
Heather Lee, New York University Shanghai
Gretchen Long, Williams College
Peter Mabli, The Graduate Center, CUNY
Ellen Noonan, New York University
Manuel R. Rodríguez, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution
Evan Rothman, The Graduate Center, CUNY
Martha Sandweiss, Princeton University
David Scheckel, The Graduate Center, CUNY
Susan Schulten, University of Denver
Sandra Slater, College of Charleston
Nate Sleeter, Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, George Mason University
Carli Snyder, The Graduate Center, CUNY
Karen Sotiropoulos, Cleveland State University
Donna Thompson Ray, The Graduate Center, CUNY
Anne Valk, The Graduate Center, CUNY

Who Built America? / OER “Historians Disagree” Authors

Lori J. Daggar, Ursinus College
Gregory P. Downs, University of California, Davis
Elise A. Mitchell, Swarthmore College
David Parsons, California State University, Channel Islands
Kim Phillips-Fein, Columbia University
Naoko Shibusawa, Brown University

Who Built America? / OER Content Advisors and Reviewers

Madison Bastress, New York University
Elizabeth Blackmar, Columbia University
David Brundage, University of California, Santa Cruz
Elise Ciregna, Harvard University
David Correia, University of New Mexico
Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch.com
Matthew Fox-Amato, University of Idaho
Steven Hahn, New York University
Ben H. Johnson, Loyola University Chicago
David K. Johnson, University of South Florida
Prathibha Kanakamedela, Bronx Community College, CUNY
Blair L. M. Kelley, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
Ari Kelman, University of California, Davis
Steven Lawson, Rutgers University
Heather Lee, New York University Shanghai
Neil Maher, New Jersey Institute of Technology
Jen Manion, Amherst College
Premilla Nadasen, Barnard College
Jake Newsome, Independent Scholar
Mae Ngai, Columbia University
David Oshinsky, New York University
Millery Polyne, New York University
Seth Rockman, Brown University
Tom Scheinfeldt, University of Connecticut
David Serlin, University of California, San Diego
Sasha Maria Suarez, University of Wisconsin

Who Built America? / OER Teaching Advisors

Robert Bland, University of Tennessee, Knoxville
Amanda Brickell Bellows, The New School
Madeline DeDe-Panken, The Graduate Center, CUNY
Prathibha Kanakamedela, Bronx Community College, CUNY
Marcus Rediker, University of Pittsburgh
Luke Waltzer, The Graduate Center, CUNY

Who Built America? / OER Research

Raquel Aubrey
Gabriella Fasold Berges
Amanda Bellows
Julian Ehsan
David Scheckel
Nate Sleeter
Carli Snyder
Emily Uruchima
Isa Vasquez

Who Built America? / OER Project Design and Coding

Marco Battistella
Joe Kirchhof
Peter Mabli
Agile Humanities

Who Built America? / OER Copyediting

Jane Cavolina