Here is the latest version of my US History textbook, Key Moments in American History. I wrote the first version of this textbook in 2011 when I was teaching the US History section of the interdisciplinary, 11th-grade American Civ course at the Key School in Annapolis, MD. When I moved back to Keene NH and began teaching US History at the River Valley Community College in 2015, I modified my original text, incorporating more primary material–much of which was originally compiled by my Key School colleague, Dr. Bob McCarthy, for his Political Philosophy section of the American Civ course.
The first version below is in Word, which allows one to use the dynamic table of content and play the embedded videos and music; this functionality may not be available if one opens this text in programs other than Word (Warning: the file is 137.6 MB and the text is a little over 1,000 pages long.)
The second version is a .pdf file, in which the dynamic table of content and the embedded videos and music are not functional. It is 154.7 MB.
Please feel free to download this textbook and use it in a non-profit educational context.
(Please note that these downloadable versions have been updated as of March 24, 2018. I have made a few minor corrections to the text and have re-embedded the links to the audio and video files in the .docx file so that they should be functioning.)
Key Moments in American History
Key Moments in American History pdf
I used some of the primary documents assembled for Key Moments in American History as supplementary readings for a Myth in US Culture course I taught at River Valley Key Moments in American History Community College. That reading packet is here: Myth in US Culture
To see how this supplementary reading related to the rest of that Myth in US Culture course, see the syllabus: HUMK 140A Myth in US Culture Syllabus
Murray C McClellan 