Thank you for using Who Built America? The project is currently in beta with new features, including the My WBA? Collection Tool, to be implemented over the coming weeks, so please check back. If you have feedback or encounter any bugs, please fill out this form.
Who Built America? offers a thirty-chapter 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letters, diaries, autobiographies, poems, songs, journalism, fiction, official testimony, oral histories, and other historical documents—along with a timeline and suggestions for further reading.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of historical evidence, including many images, they are intended to help readers become comfortable looking closely at historical documents and to understand how historians arrive at their understanding of events or ideas.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 the History Matters Repository, 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.
The My WBA? Collection Tool (coming soon) allows you to select chapter sections, images, and voices from within the textbook as well as essays and primary sources from the History Matters Repository to create customized collections that you can share with students or use for presentations through a unique url.
