The American Yawp: Open U.S. History Textbook

Citation

Locke, J. L., & Wright, B. (Eds.). (2026). The American Yawp: A Massively Collaborative Open History of the United States (2nd ed., 2 vols.). Stanford University Press. Free official edition: https://www.americanyawp.com/

Chapter Summary

The current online text is the 2026 "second edition", which became the default on the site on 1 July 2026. It has 28 chapters in two volumes: Volume I (Chapters 1–14) runs to Reconstruction and Volume II (Chapters 15–28) starts in 1877. Each chapter is a numbered run of illustrated, footnoted sections from an introduction, usually built around a single scene, to a conclusion, followed by recommended reading (and, in Volume I, linked primary sources). A companion American Yawp Reader collects documents aligned with this edition; the previous 30-chapter edition stays archived on the site.

Chapter 1: American Origins

Rewritten for the second edition to deal entirely with Indigenous history before and around European arrival. It covers the first Americans, origin and migration traditions, continent-wide changes and Indigenous political systems, and ends by calling European arrival the second, not the first, chapter of the story.

Chapters 2–3: Making an Atlantic World; Colliding Cultures

Chapter 2 places Iberian expansion within a wider history of empire and capitalism: Europe's entry into the Atlantic, North and West Africa before 1500, the origins of the slave trade, and Spanish conquest and rule in America and North America. Chapter 3 follows the other European powers that challenged Spain, English colonization, Jamestown and New England, stressing that Native peoples still controlled most of the continent.

Chapters 4–5: British North America; Colonial Society

Chapter 4 follows the seventeenth-century English colonies through slavery and the making of race, the upheavals in Britain, new colonies, and a section on riot, rebellion and revolt. Chapter 5 turns to the eighteenth century: consumption and Atlantic trade, slavery and antislavery, political and religious freedoms, Indigenous responses to settlement, the Seven Years' War and Pontiac's War.

Chapters 6–8: The American Revolution; A New Nation; The Early Republic

The Revolution is treated through its origins, causes, independence, the war and its consequences, with an emphasis on its paradoxes, such as a war for liberty that left slavery in place. Chapter 7 covers the 1780s and 1790s from Shays's Rebellion and the Constitutional Convention through ratification, Hamilton's financial system, the French Revolution, slavery and westward expansion, religious freedom and the election of 1800. Chapter 8 covers the Jeffersonian period, free and enslaved Black Americans, Native American power and the War of 1812.

Chapters 9–11: Getting Forward; American Democracy; Growth and Conflict

In the second edition the antebellum decades are told in chronological order rather than in thematic chapters: 1815–1828 (market revolution, Jacksonian politics, the Second Great Awakening), 1829–1837 (Jackson's presidency, nullification and the Bank War, Indigenous dispossession, the cotton belt, Texas, reform and abolition) and 1838–1848 (cities and industry, new faiths and moral reform, western expansion and the US–Mexican War).

Chapters 12–14: The National Crisis; The Civil War; Reconstruction

Chapter 12 traces how slavery's expansion turned a sectional conflict into a national one, from the Gold Rush and "Cotton Is King" to free-soil politics. Chapter 13 follows the war from secession through a war for Union (1861–1863) to a war for emancipation (1863–1865). Chapter 14 deals with the politics of Reconstruction, the meaning of Black freedom, women, racial violence, economic development, the West and Reconstruction's end, framed as a project that was overthrown rather than simply a success or failure.

Chapters 15–17: Capital and Labor; Geographies of Empire; New Lives

Volume II opens with the Great Railroad Strike of 1877 and the rise of industrial capitalism, inequality, the labor and Populist movements and American radicalism. Chapter 16 joins the post–Civil War West, the Indian Wars and allotment, the US–Mexico borderlands and overseas empire after 1898 into one story. Chapter 17 covers immigration, urbanization, Black life in the "New South", and gender, religion and culture.

Chapters 18–19: The Progressive Era; World War I and Its Aftermath

Chapter 18 presents reform movements, women's movements, antitrust politics, environmentalism and Jim Crow as responses to the problems of the Gilded Age. Chapter 19 follows the United States from neutrality and intervention in Mexico into the war, the home front, the influenza pandemic, the Fourteen Points and the postwar settlement.

Chapters 20–22: The New Era; The Great Depression; World War II

The 1920s chapter covers Republican administrations, consumer culture, the "New Woman" and "New Negro", fundamentalism and the revived Ku Klux Klan. The Depression chapter moves from origins and Hoover to lived experience, the Bonus Army, the first and second New Deals and their legacy. The World War II chapter focuses on the American experience, including the wartime economy, women, race and planning for the postwar world.

Chapters 23–25: The Cold War; The Affluent Society; The Sixties

Chapter 23 treats the Cold War as a global political and ideological struggle, with sections on the arms race, McCarthyism and decolonization. Chapter 24 takes its title from Galbraith's 1958 book and covers suburbs, education and civil rights, gender and the politics of postwar "consensus". Chapter 25 covers the civil rights movement, the Great Society, the origins of the Vietnam War and the activism of the decade.

Chapters 26–28: The Unraveling; The Triumph of the Right; American Carnage

Chapter 26 runs from Vietnam and 1968 through Nixon, deindustrialization, the environmental movement, sexual politics and the "misery index" of the 1970s, including the Carter years. Chapter 27 follows the New Right from its rise through the Reagan presidency, the culture wars and the 1990s. Chapter 28 starts with the attack on the Capitol on 6 January 2021 and covers 11 September 2001, the Great Recession, the Obama years, Trump-era politics and the pandemic.

Key Concepts

Volume I: Before 1877 (Chapters 1–14)

• Indigenous history as the starting point: the book begins with millennia of Native American societies and treats European arrival as a later chapter.
• The Atlantic world: the system linking Europe, Africa and the Americas through empire, trade and the forced migration of enslaved Africans.
• Slavery and the making of race: the shift from servant to enslaved African labour in the colonies and the legal codification of racial slavery.
• Market revolution: the economic changes of the early nineteenth century that reshaped work, politics and family life.
• From sectional to national crisis: the expansion of slavery into the West as the issue that split the Union.

Volume II: Since 1865 (Chapters 15–28)

• Capital and labor: the conflict between industrial capitalism and organized workers, farmers and radicals in the late nineteenth century.
• Geographies of empire: the treatment of western conquest, borderlands and overseas imperialism as connected processes.
• New Deal: the federal response to the Great Depression, studied for its programs, its limits on race and region, and its legacy.
• The New Right: the libertarian-economic and religious-conservative movement that reshaped politics from 1980.

Critical Analysis

Strengths

• Openly licensed and free. The text is released under a CC BY-SA 4.0 licence and can be read online, downloaded as PDFs by volume and adapted; the editors describe it as written by more than three hundred historians and reviewed by Stanford University Press, which also publishes a low-cost print edition.
• Recent scholarship and broad coverage. The introduction promises transnational perspectives, diverse voices and narratives of resistance alongside politics and power. The second edition's update log shows this in practice: an entirely new Indigenous opening chapter, more on Africa, the Southwest and borderlands, gender, disability and LGBTQ history, and Native American history carried through the twentieth century.
• Built for a two-semester course. The 2026 reorganisation cut each volume from fifteen to fourteen chapters, based on instructor feedback, so that a semester can take roughly one chapter a week; the antebellum chapters were rewritten as a strict chronology to remove the overlap of the old thematic chapters.
• Sources for further work. Volume I chapters list linked primary sources with short introductions, and every chapter gives recommended reading.

Limitations

• Narrative with few study aids. Chapters have no learning objectives, review questions, timelines or glossaries; students must build their own chronology and study questions.
• Uneven apparatus after the revision. In the current text only the Volume I chapters carry a primary-source list; the Volume II chapters end with reference material only, so the Reader is needed for documents after 1877.
• A collective voice. Each chapter has its own editors and many contributors, so the text is a synthesis rather than one historian's argument.
• A changing text. The editors call it a living text. Page content, chapter numbers and titles have changed between editions (the first edition had 30 chapters), so students should check that they are reading the same version as their course.

Where It Fits in the Course

Within this course The American Yawp is the free, full-length survey that can carry a whole two-semester sequence. Eric Foner's Give Me Liberty! covers the same ground as a commercial survey organised around one theme, freedom; either can serve as the main narrative, and the Yawp is a free way to check another survey's account. Paul S. Boyer's American History: A Very Short Introduction is a much shorter interpretive overview suited to reading before the course or as a revision of the whole sweep.

The other books go deeper on parts of the story. James M. McPherson's Battle Cry of Freedom is a full one-volume history of the period from the Mexican War to the end of the Civil War and fits after Chapters 11–13. Detroit: I Do Mind Dying, a study of radical Black labour activism, suits Chapters 25–26. American History Now, edited by Eric Foner and Lisa McGirr, is a set of historiographical essays on how interpretations have changed, best read once the narrative is familiar.

How to Use This Book

The book assumes no earlier coursework and is written for general readers and college survey courses. A plan for each semester:

• Core: one chapter a week, in order; chapters are long (roughly 9,000–15,000 words with notes), and the conclusion summarises each one's argument.
• Volume I: Chapters 1–3 set up the Indigenous and Atlantic framework the rest of the volume depends on; do not skip them even if the course begins with the English colonies. Chapters 9–11 are best read as one continuous story of the decades from 1815 to 1848.
• Volume II: Chapter 14 (Reconstruction) is available in both print volumes; courses starting in 1865 can begin there. Chapters 26–28 are the most recent material and are likely to change most between versions.
• Alongside the text: read two or three of the linked primary sources for each Volume I chapter and the matching documents in the Reader; use the recommended reading lists to choose books for papers.
• Self-study: after each chapter, write a short timeline and the conclusion's main argument in your own words.

Edition and Sources

This guide is based on the 2026 second edition of the free online text at americanyawp.com (Creative Commons BY-SA 4.0), using the introduction, the section headings, opening sections, conclusions and primary-source and reference sections of all 28 chapters, and the site's update log describing the changes from the first edition.