THE AMERICAN YAWP: A Massively Collaborative Open Access U.S. History Textbook

[donbosco]

The American Yawp

It is Free.

"Introduction​

Primary sources are the raw materials of history: written accounts, physical objects, and visual material allow historians to build narratives and construct arguments. Letters, diaries, written publications, laws, artwork, buildings, skeletal remains, environmental data, and even oral histories can all provide the first-hand evidence that historians need to make convincing arguments about the past and to properly evaluate the historical arguments made by others. Historians work primary sources into secondary and even tertiary sources: the books and textbooks assigned to students. They all rely, one way or another, on primary sources.

Students of history must know how to analyze and critically evaluate primary sources, for primary sources can distort as much as they reveal. The voice of slaves, for instance, can be drowned out by the letters and journals of slaveholders. We can produce more honest histories by interrogating our sources, asking questions such as, Who created this source? Who was their audience? How might their beliefs and perspectives have influenced their understanding? In the case of slavery, for instance, a critical eye is often needed to read between the lines and uncover forgotten histories hidden within the materials available to us. Historians must make the most of the sources they have. But while some eras and some topics lack abundant primary sources, others have almost too many, often more than any single historian can read and analyze. Under such conditions it can be tempting to cherry pick sources and create a narrative of one’s own choosing, but good historians must read widely and maintain an open but critical mind to discover patterns and produce historical insights.

Just as historians must approach their sources with a critical eye, so too must they be aware of their own preconceptions and biases–their own place in history. “The past is a foreign country,” novelist L.P. Harltey wrote, “they do things differently there.” We must be critical of ourselves. We cannot expect individuals in the past to know what we know or to behave as we behave. They had their own ideas and their own dreams. They viewed the world differently than we do. So if we are to understand the past, we must begin by recognizing the present. The more we study the past, the more we come to understand ourselves.

Learning to ask good questions is an important historical skill, yet we will often not know which questions to ask until we have steeped ourselves in primary sources. You may already have questions in mind as you read and evaluate the sources in this reader, but you should also pay attention to any thoughts, emotions, and historical questions that they may provoke. History is a conversation between the past and present, and, by reading the following sources and thinking critically about them, we hope that you will bring bring your own curiosity and creativity to the conversation."

There is also a primary source appendix: The American Yawp



"Yawp \yôp\ n: 1: a raucous noise 2: rough vigorous language
"I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world." Walt Whitman, 1855."

 

[donbosco]

Chapter 29, the penultimate chapter of The American Yawp is titled, "The Triumph of the Right." It concludes with the following:

"XI. Conclusion
Reagan left office in 1988 with the Cold War waning and the economy booming. Unemployment had dipped to 5 percent by 1988. Between 1981 and 1986, gas prices fell from $1.38 per gallon to 95¢. The stock market recovered from the crash, and the Dow Jones Industrial Average—which stood at 950 in 1981—reached 2,239 by the end of Reagan’s second term. Yet the economic gains of the decade were unequally distributed. The top fifth of households enjoyed rising incomes while the rest stagnated or declined. In constant dollars, annual chief executive officer (CEO) pay rose from $3 million in 1980 to roughly $12 million during Reagan’s last year in the White House. Between 1985 and 1989 the number of Americans living in poverty remained steady at thirty-three million. Real per capita money income grew at only 2 percent per year, a rate roughly equal to the Carter years. The American economy saw more jobs created than lost during the 1980s, but half of the jobs eliminated were in high-paying industries. Furthermore, half of the new jobs failed to pay wages above the poverty line. The economic divide was most acute for African Americans and Latinos, one third of whom qualified as poor.

The triumph of the right proved incomplete. The number of government employees actually increased under Reagan. With more than 80 percent of the federal budget committed to defense, entitlement programs, and interest on the national debt, the right’s goal of deficit elimination floundered for lack of substantial areas to cut. Between 1980 and 1989 the national debt rose from $914 billion to $2.7 trillion. Despite steep tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy, the overall tax burden of the American public basically remained unchanged. Moreover, so-called regressive taxes on payroll and certain goods actually increased the tax burden on low- and middle-income Americans. Finally, Reagan slowed but failed to vanquish the five-decade legacy of liberal economics. Most New Deal and Great Society programs proved durable. Government still offered its neediest citizens a safety net, if a now continually shrinking one.

Yet the discourse of American politics had irrevocably changed. The preeminence of conservative political ideas grew ever more pronounced, even when Democrats controlled Congress or the White House. In response to the conservative mood of the country, the Democratic Party adapted its own message to accommodate many of the Republicans’ Reagan-era ideas and innovations. The United States was on a rightward path." 29. The Triumph of the Right | THE AMERICAN YAWP



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Chapter 30, "Recent Events" of The American Yawp is arranged in the following way:

• I. Introduction
• II. American Politics before September 11, 2001
• III. September 11 and the War on Terror
• IV. The End of the Bush Years
• V. The Great Recession
• VI. The Obama Years
• VII. Stagnation
• VIII. American Carnage
• IX. The Pandemic
• X. New Horizons
• IX. Conclusion
• X. Primary Sources
• XI. Reference Material

"I. Introduction
[T]he events of January 6 were rooted in history.
Revolutionary technological change, unprecedented global flows of goods and people and capital, an amorphous decades-long War on Terror, accelerating inequality, growing diversity, a changing climate, political stalemate: our present is not an island of circumstance but a product of history. Time marches forever on. The present becomes the past, but, as William Faulkner famously put it, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”4 The last several decades of American history have culminated in the present, an era of innovation and advancement but also of stark partisan division, racial and ethnic tension, protests, gender divides, uneven economic growth, widening inequalities, military interventions, bouts of mass violence, and pervasive anxieties about the present and future of the United States. Through boom and bust, national tragedy, foreign wars, and the maturation of a new generation, a new chapter of American history is busy being written." The American Yawp: 30. The Recent Past | THE AMERICAN YAWP

This is the Final Chapter in The American Yawp.