The “Own It!” Handbook for Adults & Teens is a step-by-step guide to a fourteen topic after-school program, such as a Boys & Girls Club, or an adult Community Building group. For adults, it seeks to bridge divides and  explore what Americans have in common. For teens, it is a transformative after-school, trauma-informed enrichment program. It nurtures academic skills, personal growth and leadership. For all, it uses history to connect our past to our future, as part of the Own Your History® (OYH) Collection. Our inheritances from family history and the American experience provide the starting point for our personal journeys.  Our individual stories are part of a complex American history. We each can choose consciously to write our life story and work for a greater future. Own It! is not “school” but enhances students’ engagement in being creative, making things happen, and  achieving goals. Its mission is to help them step up and enrich their lives, especially by understanding that they live in history.

After the bombing of Pearl Harbor, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, which established 10 internment camps for "national security" purposes. Although most internment camps were along the West Coast, others could be found in Wyoming and Colorado, and as far east as Arkansas. One photo shows Japanese American boys in San Francisco shortly before the evacuation order; another shows a woman waiting for the evacuation bus in Hayward; approximately 660 people being evacuated by bus from San Francisco on the first day of the program; and an aerial image of people sitting on their belongings, waiting to be taken to Manzanar. The government-sponsored War Relocation Authority (WRA) hired Dorothea Lange and other photographers to take pictures of the relocation and internment of Japanese Americans. Lange?s photographs, some of which were suppressed by the WRA and only released later, often capture the irony inherent in the situation. Although internees were allowed to take only what they could carry with them to the camps, one Lange photo juxtaposes a bus poster "Such a load off my mind ? Bekins stored my things" next to a pile of internees' belongings. Another striking Lange image shows a Japanese American-owned corner store with a large "I am an American" banner hanging beneath a "Sold" sign. Another photograph of an engine's distributor, removed from a car owned by an internee, showed that people were truly prisoners at the camp, unable to drive their own cars away. Several paintings by interned Japanese American artists Henry Sugimoto and Hisako Hibi reflect their emotional experiences and give viewers a sense of what life was like for them. The paintings express the pain, suffering, and anger of those subjected to internment. Over 100,000 Japanese American men, women, and children were relocated and detained at these camps. Photographs here show people of all ages, including a grandfather and grandchild, and young children. This internment is now recognized as a violation of their human and civil rights. In 1980, the US government officially apologized and reparations were paid to survivors.

 U.S. History is designed to meet the scope and sequence requirements of most introductory courses. The text provides a balanced approach to U.S. history, considering the people, events, and ideas that have shaped the United States from both the top down (politics, economics, diplomacy) and bottom up (eyewitness accounts, lived experience). U.S. History covers key forces that form the American experience, with particular attention to issues of race, class, and gender.Senior Contributing AuthorsP. Scott Corbett, Ventura CollegeVolker Janssen, California State University, FullertonJohn M. Lund, Keene State CollegeTodd Pfannestiel, Clarion UniversityPaul Vickery, Oral Roberts UniversitySylvie Waskiewicz

What is mercantilism? How did economics contribute to rising tensions between the North and the South in the years before the Civil War? What caused the Great Depression? In this video course designed specifically to help students study for the AP US History exam and SAT Subject Test, Professor Brian Domitrovich of Sam Houston State University explains key events in US economic history and surveys different (and sometimes opposing) viewpoints on each event.

U.S. History is designed for a two-semester American history sequence. It is traditional in coverage, following a roughly chronological outline, and using a balanced approach that includes political, economic, social, and cultural developments. At the same time, the book includes a number of innovative and interactive features designed to enhance student learning. Instructors can also customize the book, adapting it to the approach that works best in their classroom.