"I too am not a bit tamed—I too am untranslatable / I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world." —Walt Whitman, "Song of Myself"
The American Yawp is a free, online, collaboratively written American history textbook. Over 500 historians contributed their expertise to create the book they wanted for their own students—an accessible, synthetic narrative that reflects the best of recent historical scholarship and provides a jumping-off point for discussions in the U.S. history classroom and beyond.
Long before Whitman and long after, Americans have sung something collectively amid the deafening roar of their many individual voices. The American Yawp highlights the dynamism and conflict inherent in the history of the United States, while also looking for the common threads that help us make sense of the past. Without losing sight of politics and power, this book incorporates transnational perspectives, integrates diverse voices, recovers narratives of resistance, and explores the complex process of cultural creation. It looks for America in crowded slave cabins, bustling markets, congested tenements, and marbled halls.
This Second Edition has been revised and enriched with new material throughout, particularly on Indigenous history, Mexican American history, and twenty-first century American history. A revised chapter structure improves the chronological flow of the narrative.
The fully peer-reviewed edition of The American Yawp is available in two print volumes designed for the U.S. history survey course. Volume 1 begins with the indigenous people who called the Americas home before chronicling the collision of Native Americans, Europeans, and Africans. This volume traces the development of colonial society in the context of the larger Atlantic World and investigates the origins and ruptures of slavery, the American Revolution, and the new nation's development and rebirth through the Civil War and Reconstruction.
Balancing academic rigor with popular readability, this book offers a multi-layered, democratic approach to the American past, and enables students to ask their own questions about how the past informs the problems and opportunities we confront today.