Welcome to HIS 103 US History since 1877. This year you’re part of an exciting project, the debut of America’s most up-to-date and innovative American history textbook, History of the United States since 1865: Information Literacy and Critical Thinking, by Paul A. Tenkotte (Northern Kentucky University). If you’re expecting a dry, encyclopedic textbook crammed full of dates and trivial facts that you’re never going to remember and that don’t seem relevant to your life, don’t look here. Instead, you’ll find a media-rich, fully online, fully searchable book, with hundreds of photos, tables, and links to primary and secondary resources, as well as to short videos, songs, maps, and animations. There are also quizzes, discussions, and assignments. It’s a complete package at one price, not requiring you to buy expensive supplemental books and materials. And you have access to it in all popular formats.

Further, unlike most history textbooks, this is not simply a chronological survey, bouncing back and forth between poorly related and underdeveloped themes. Instead, this is a book to help you navigate the dizzying amount of information available in our world and to determine what is useful and what is not. In other words, it is an “information literacy” primer. In addition, the book develops and sharpens your critical thinking skills, introducing you to many different techniques useful in evaluating the strengths and weaknesses of what others say and write. Wrapped intimately around all of that is a story of American history, and a review of basic civics, that strives to explain how the United States of yesterday evolved into the nation that it is today.

When Great River Learning (GRL), a higher education publishing company “committed to developing publications that are media-rich, well designed, and powerful,” asked me to author their first history textbook ever, I accepted with enthusiasm. GRL is an innovative publisher, with young and energetic editors that readily accept challenges. I thoroughly enjoyed working with all of them.