The American Yawp

Historians have been urging each other to ditch their textbooks for the last several years. (See, for example, Lendol Calder, “Uncoverage: Toward a Signature Pedagogy for the History Survey,” Journal of American History, March 2006, pp. 1358–70.) Textbooks are often boring, written by committee, unable to render the arguments that make history something more than “what happened.” Textbooks are also expensive, especially as students graduate with deeper debt every year. Judging by the piles of unsolicited exam copies that arrive in our department offices each semester, the commercial textbook appears to be alive and well. But increasingly, historians of the United States have options: History Matters, the University of Houston's Digital History, Rice University's Open Stax, Milestone Documents, and the Stanford University History Education Group's Reading like a Historian are all valuable resources for instructors looking to break away from the domination of textbooks. The American Yawp joined these ranks in 2014 as a “collaboratively built” U.S. history textbook covering material from the last global ice age to Obergefell v. Hodges (2015), accompanied by The American Yawp Reader for primary sources. Edited by Joseph Locke of the University of Houston–Victoria and Ben Wright of the University of Texas at Dallas, The American Yawp boasts an impressive roster of advisers, more than 250 contributors, and a just-announced collaboration with the annotation-everywhere software Hypothes.is. The sparse, clean design works just as well on mobile devices as on larger screens, and well-chosen, high-resolution images from Wikimedia commons, the Library of Congress, and other sources enliven the narrative. Footnotes, though scattered somewhat irregularly through the text, pinpoint the sources of some anecdotes and stories—something I have often wanted from commercial textbooks. The site also uses a version of the WordPress plugin CommentPress to manage feedback: readers can suggest changes, which are either incorporated immediately (in the case of smaller errors) or in the annual revision process each summer (for more substantive concerns

American history · Archaeology · Library science · Media studies · Milestone · Political science · Reading (process · Sociology · Computer Science · Educator Training and Historical Pedagogy · History · Law