Who Built America? Working People and the Nation’s History will soon become an updated, completely free, open education resource (OER) finalizing a 38-year process of making social history accessible to the broad public thanks to a new grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Office of Digital Humanities.

ASHP will work in partnership with the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media to combine the 2-volume textbook with ASHP’s varied multimedia teaching resources including the ten 30-minute documentaries, “excursions” from the Who Built America? CD-ROMs and the website History Matters: The U.S. Survey Course on the Web. The project allows us to revitalize the History Matters resources, which went online twenty years ago (ancient by web standards) with programming that will guarantee its stability for the future.

As a fully customizable OER, instructors will be able to make selections from the textbook, all the primary and teaching resources of History Matters as well as new features that will be added. Annelise Orleck, labor historian from Dartmouth College is updating the textbook with a new chapter covering 2007 to the present.

By its nature as an open digital resource, Who Built America? The OER will be available to the broad international public including trade unions, community-based activists, museums, and other organizations that have used ASHP’s educational materials for the past 38 years.