Who Built America? surveys 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. In an age when globalizing economies, profound technological changes, and ever more remote exercises of power are altering the nature of life and labor, Who Built America?’s distinctive interpretation of the nation’s past is more necessary than ever. 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 and challenges 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. This emphasis puts the history of the workplace, community, family, gender roles, race, and ethnicity at the center of the more familiar textbook narrative of politics and economic development; in doing so, it renders more intelligible the beliefs and actions of the nation’s economic, political, and intellectual elite. By taking up the central questions of how the nation’s work has changed and how workers have changed the nation, Who Built America? offers an indispensable guide to the historical developments that have brought us to the present day.

We have defined the category of “working people” broadly. Throughout much of its history, the nation’s actual workforce embraced a wide spectrum of people laboring in very different conditions and settings. Answering the question “Who built America?” therefore requires attention not only to wage-earning industrial employees but also to indentured servants, slaves, tenant farmers, sharecroppers, independent farm families, artisans, small proprietors, day laborers, clerks, domestic workers, outworkers, service and technical workers, and women and children performing unpaid family labor—in short, the great majority of the American population at every phase of the country’s development.

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 this book, ASHP has produced over the past quarter century a wide range of accessible educational materials in print, video, and digital media, and has worked closely with college, high-school, and adult- and labor-education teachers to help them use these resources effectively in their classrooms.

Who Built America? Open Educational Resource retains its distinctive interpretation and strong point of view. 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.

In the guise of a film-noir detective story, The Big H questions some of the ways history is taught, revealing working people’s role in shaping the nation’s past. View the 26-minute video in full or in sections.

The drawings, paintings, prints, cartoons, photographs, objects, and other visual media that we have selected to illustrate Who Built America? supplement the book’s themes and narrative, showing the people, places, and events discussed in the text. In this new edition, we have included examples of “material culture”—from implements used in the workshop or office to furniture used in the home—to show how everyday objects embodied significant changes in social life. But, in keeping with our approach in the first edition of the book, our illustrations also address subjects not included in the narrative: they offer perspectives on the past that were often not articulated in the written record or were conveyed in a wholly different way from “the word” via visual media. Throughout U.S. history, ideas, experiences, events, and conditions were recorded and expressed in evocative and provocative images and objects that Americans treated with as much seriousness and enjoyment as they did text. Sometimes tainted by racism or chauvinism and marked by invidious caricatures, Americans challenged these images as part of their larger longstanding struggles to achieve equality. In short, images mattered, and the illustrations and captions in each chapter of Who Built America? offer readers a parallel narrative that, in juxtaposition to the text, demonstrates how different visual media interpreted and thus shaped beliefs about the people, events, and ideas of the time.