The American Yawp Vol. I: To 1877

We are the heirs of our history. Our communities, our politics, our culture: it is all a product of the past. As William Faulkner wrote, “The past
is never dead. It’s not even past.”1
To understand who we are, we must
therefore understand our history.
But what is history? What does it mean to study the past? History
can never be the simple memorizing of names and dates (how would we
even know what names and dates are worth studying?). It is too complex a task and too dynamic a process to be reduced to that. It must be
something more because, in a sense, it is we who give life to the past.
Historians ask historical questions, weigh evidence from primary sources
(material produced in the era under study), grapple with rival interpretations, and argue for their conclusions. History, then, is our ongoing
conversation about the past.
Every generation must write its own history. Old conclusions—say,
about the motives of European explorers or the realities of life on slave
plantations—fall before new evidence and new outlooks. Names of
Preface
© 2019 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University.
Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. www.americanyawp.com
x Prefac e
leaders and dates of events may not change, but the weight we give them
and the context with which we frame them invariably evolves. History is
a conversation between the past and the present. To understand a global
society, we must explore a history of transnational forces. To understand
the lived experiences of ordinary Americans, we must look beyond the
elites who framed older textbooks and listen to the poor and disadvantaged from all generations

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