In response to the ever-changing challenges of teaching the survey course, Understanding the American Promise combines a newly abridged narrative with an innovative chapter architecture to focus students' attention on what's truly significant. Each chapter is fully designed to guide students' comprehension and foster their development of historical skills. Brief and affordable but still balanced in its coverage, this new textbook combines distinctive study aids, a bold new design, and lively art to give your students a clear pathway to what's important.

Understanding the American Promise, Third Edition, features a brief, question-driven narrative that models for students the inquiry-based methods used by historians and features an innovative active learning pedagogy designed to foster greater comprehension of the reading. This book includes a full-color map and art program, new primary documents, and comprehensive supplement options including LaunchPad. It is also enhanced by LearningCurve, our easy-to-assign adaptive learning system that will ensure students come to class prepared.?

A “persuasive . . . heartfelt and vividly written” call to counter systemic racism and build national solidarity in America (Publishers Weekly). The American Promise enshrined in our Constitution states that all men and women are inherently equal. And yet racism continues to corrode our society. If we cannot overcome it, Theodore Johnson argues, the promise that made America unique on Earth will have died. In When the Stars Begin to Fall, Johnson presents a compelling blueprint for the kind of national solidarity necessary to mitigate racism. Weaving together history, personal memories, and his family’s multi-generational experiences with racism, Johnson posits that solutions can be found in the exceptional citizenship long practiced in Black America. Understanding that racism is a structural crime of the state, he argues that overcoming it requires us to recognize that a color-conscious society—not a color-blind one—is the true fulfillment of the American Promise. Fueled by Johnson’s ultimate faith in the American project, grounded in his family’s longstanding optimism and his own military service, When the Stars Begin to Fall is an urgent call to undertake the process of overcoming what has long seemed intractable.

The American Promise has long been a course favorite. Students value The American Promise for its readability, clear chronology, and lively voices of ordinary Americans, while instructors rely upon the rich content, the many documents and features, and the overall support for teaching their class their way. The American Promise provides superior formats for every use--the print book allows for a seamless reading experience while LaunchPad provides the right space for active learning assignments and dynamic course management tools that measure and analyze student progress. LaunchPad comes with a wealth of primary sources and special critical thinking activities to help students progress toward achieving learning outcomes; LearningCurve, the adaptive learning tool that students love to use to test their understanding of the text and instructors love to assign to prepare students for class; and a suite of instructor resources from videos to test banks that make teaching simpler and more effective.

Spreading democracy abroad or protecting business at home: this book offers a new look at the history of the contest between isolationalism and internationalism that is as current as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and as old as America itself, with profiles of the people, policies, and events that shaped the debate.

U.S. History is designed to meet the scope and sequence requirements of most introductory courses. The text provides a balanced approach to U.S. history, considering the people, events, and ideas that have shaped the United States from both the top down (politics, economics, diplomacy) and bottom up (eyewitness accounts, lived experience). U.S. History covers key forces that form the American experience, with particular attention to issues of race, class, and gender.