history book
T h e A m e r i c A n Y Aw p
© 2019 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University.
Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. www.americanyawp.com
© 2019 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University.
Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. www.americanyawp.com
T h e
A m e r i c A n
Y Aw p
A Massively Collaborative Open U.S. History Textbook
v o l . 1 : t o XXXXXXXXXX
e di t e d by jo se ph l . l o c k e a n d be n w r ig h t
sta n f or d u n i v e r si t y pr e s s • sta n f or d, c a l i f or n i a
© 2019 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University.
Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. www.americanyawp.com
Stanford University Press
Stanford, California
© 2019 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University.
Some rights reserved.
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This book is licensed under the Creative Commons license CC BY-SA 4.0, Attribution-
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Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality pape
Li
ary of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Locke, Joseph L., editor. | Wright, Ben, editor.
Title: The American yawp : a massively collaborative open U.S. history textbook /
edited by Joseph L. Locke and Ben Wright.
Description: Stanford, California : Stanford University Press, 2019. |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN XXXXXXXXXXprint) | LCCN XXXXXXXXXXebook) |
ISBN XXXXXXXXXXe-book) | ISBN XXXXXXXXXX | ISBN XXXXXXXXXX
(v. 1 :pbk. :alk. paper) | ISBN XXXXXXXXXXv. 2 :pbk. :alk. paper) |
ISBN XXXXXXXXXXv. 1 :ebook) | ISBN XXXXXXXXXXv. 2 :ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: United States—History—Textbooks.
Classification: LCC E178.1 (ebook) | LCC E178.1 .A XXXXXXXXXXprint) |
DDC 973—dc23
LC record available at https:
lccn.loc.gov/ XXXXXXXXXX
Typeset by Newgen in Sabon LT 11/15
Cover illustration: Detail from “Grand Democratic Free Soil Banner,” by N. Cu
ier and
John Plumbe Jr., 1848. Source: Susan H. Douglas Political Americana Collection, Division
of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Li
ary.
© 2019 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University.
Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. www.americanyawp.com
Yawp \yôp\ n: 1: a raucous noise 2: rough vigorous language
“I sound my ba
aric yawp over the roofs of the world.”
Walt Whitman, 1854
© 2019 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University.
Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. www.americanyawp.com
© 2019 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University.
Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. www.americanyawp.com
Preface ix
1. The New World 1
2. Colliding Cultures 28
3. British North America 54
4. Colonial Society 81
5. The American Revolution 109
6. A New Nation 143
7. The Early Republic 170
8. The Market Revolution 198
9. Democracy in America 227
10. Religion and Reform 253
11. The Cotton Revolution 283
12. Manifest Destiny 315
13. The Sectional Crisis 343
14. The Civil War 371
15. Reconstruction 402
Contributors 435
contents
© 2019 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University.
Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. www.americanyawp.com
© 2019 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University.
Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. www.americanyawp.com
Civil rights march
from Selma to
Montgomery,
Alabama, in
1965. Li
ary of
Congress.
We are the heirs of our history. Our communities, our politics, our cul-
ture: it is all a product of the past. As William Faulkner wrote, “The past
is never dead. It’s not even past.”1 To understand who we are, we must
therefore understand our history.
But what is history? What does it mean to study the past? History
can never be the simple memorizing of names and dates (how would we
even know what names and dates are worth studying?). It is too com-
plex a task and too dynamic a process to be reduced to that. It must be
something more because, in a sense, it is we who give life to the past.
Historians ask historical questions, weigh evidence from primary sources
(material produced in the era under study), grapple with rival interpre-
tations, and argue for their conclusions. History, then, is our ongoing
conversation about the past.
Every generation must write its own history. Old conclusions—say,
about the motives of European explorers or the realities of life on slave
plantations—fall before new evidence and new outlooks. Names of
preface
© 2019 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University.
Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. www.americanyawp.com
x p r e f A c e
leaders and dates of events may not change, but the weight we give them
and the context with which we frame them invariably evolves. History is
a conversation between the past and the present. To understand a global
society, we must explore a history of transnational forces. To understand
the lived experiences of ordinary Americans, we must look beyond the
elites who framed older textbooks and listen to the poor and disadvan-
taged from all generations.
But why study history in the first place? History can cultivate essential
and relevant—or, in more utilitarian terms, “marketable”—skills: careful
eading, creative thinking, and clear communication. Many are familiar
with a famous quote of philosopher George Santayana: “Those who fail
to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.”2 The role of history in
shaping cu
ent events is more complicated than this quote implies, but
Santayana was right in arguing that history offers important lessons. The
historical sensibility yields perspective and context and
oader aware-
ness. It liberates us from our na
ow experiences and pulls us into, in the
words of historian Peter Stearns, “the laboratory of human experience.”3
Perhaps a better way to articulate the importance of studying history
would be, “Those who fail to understand their history will fail to under-
stand themselves.”
Historical interpretation is never wholly subjective: it requires method,
igor, and perspective. The open nature of historical discourse does not
mean that all arguments—and certainly not all “opinions”—about the
past are equally valid. Some are simply wrong. And yet good historical
questions will not always have easy answers. Asking “When did Chris-
topher Columbus first sail across the Atlantic?” will tell us far less than
“What inspired Columbus to attempt his voyage?” or “How did Native
Americans interpret the a
ival of Europeans?” Crafting answers to these
questions reveals far greater insights into our history.
But how can any textbook encapsulate American history? Should it
organize around certain themes or su
ender to the impossibility of syn-
thesis and retreat toward generality? In the oft-cited lines of the Ameri-
can poet Walt Whitman, we found as good an organizing principle as any
other: “I too am not a bit tamed—I too am untranslatable,” he wrote,
“I sound my ba
aric yawp over the roofs of the world.”4 Long before
Whitman and long after, Americans have sung something collectively
amid the deafening roar of their many individual voices. Here we find
oth chorus and cacophony together, as one. This textbook therefore
offers the story of that ba
aric, untranslatable American yawp by con-
© 2019 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University.
Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. www.americanyawp.com
p r e f A c e x i
structing a coherent and accessible na
ative from all the best of recent
historical scholarship. Without losing sight of politics and power, it in-
corporates transnational perspectives, integrates diverse voices, recovers
na
atives of resistance, and explores the complex process of cultural
creation. It looks for America in crowded slave cabins, bustling markets,
congested tenements, and ma
led halls. It navigates between maternity
wards, prisons, streets, bars, and boardrooms. Whitman’s America, like
ours, cut across the na
ow boundaries that can strangle na
atives of
American history.
We have produced The American Yawp to help guide students in
their encounter with American history. The American Yawp is a col-
laboratively built, open American history textbook designed for general
eaders and college-level history courses. Over three hundred academic
historians—scholars and experienced college-level instructors—have
come together and freely volunteered their expertise to help democratize
the American past for twenty-first century readers. The project is freely
accessible online at www .AmericanYawp .com, and in addition to provid-
ing a peer review of the text, Stanford University Press has partnered with
The American Yawp to publish a print edition. Furthermore, The Ameri-
can Yawp remains an evolving, collaborative text: you are encouraged to
help us improve by offering comments on our feedback page, available
through AmericanYawp .com.
The American Yawp is a fully open resource: you are encouraged to
use it, download it, distribute it, and modify it as you see fit. The project
is formally operated under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike
4.0 International (CC-BY-SA) License and is designed to meet the stan-
dards of a “Free Cultural Work.” We are happy to share it and we hope
you will do the same.
Joseph Locke & Ben Wright, editors
n o T e s T o p r e fAc e
1. William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun (New York: Random House,
1954), 73.
2. George Santayana, The Life of Reason: Or the Phases of Human Progress,
Volume I (New York: Scribner