Experience History: Interpreting America's Past

Connect students to the stories of history. Connect students to the experience of history. Connect students to success in history.

At McGraw-Hill, we have spent the past few years deepening our understanding of the student and instructor experience. Employing a wide array of research tools including surveys, focus groups, and ethnographic studies, we've identified areas in need of improvement to provide an opportunity for greater learning and teaching experiences. Experience History is a direct result of this.

Experience History is also a first in American History. Its groundbreaking adaptive diagnostic and interactive exercises paired with its lively narrative and engaging visuals create a unique teaching and learning environment propelling greater student success and better course results. Instructors gain better insight into students' engagement and understanding as students develop a base of knowledge and construct critical thinking skills. Gripping stories keep students turning the page while the adaptive diagnostics for each chapter and a personalized study plan for each individual student help students prepare for class discussions and course work while enjoying increased course success.

Experience History emphasizes that history is not just a collection of proven facts, but is "created" from the detective work of historians examining evidence from the past. Providing the interactive environment that only an integrated solution can provide, Experience History gives students the opportunity to examine primary sources and explore specific periods and events. This leads to greater understanding as well as the building and practicing of critical thinking skills. As students uniquely experience American History, Experience History propels students to greater understanding while achieving greater course success.

Give students an experience. Improve course participation and performance. Experience History, and experience success.

James West Davidson received his B.A. from Haverford College and his Ph.D. from Yale University. A historian who has pursued a full-time writing career, he is the author of numerous books, among them After the Fact: The Art of Historical Detection (with Mark H. Lytle), The Logic of Millennial Thought: Eighteenth Century New England, and Great Heart: The History of a Labrador Adventure (with John Rugge). He is co-editor with Michael Stiff of the Oxford New Narratives in American History, in which his most recent book appears: 'They Say': Ida B. Wells and the Reconstruction of Race.

Brian DeLay (Ph.D., Harvard) is Assistant Professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley. He specializes in colonial and 19th century U.S. and Mexican history. His scholarship has won awards from the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic, the Western History Association, the Council on Latin American History, the American Society for Ethnohistory, the Pacific Coast Branch of the American Historical Association, and the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations. He is the author of War of a Thousand Deserts: Indian Raids and the U.S.-Mexican War (Yale, 2008), and is currently at work on a book about the international arms trade and the re-creation of the Americas during the long nineteenth century. He can be reached at delay@berkeley.edu and his website is http://history.berkeley.edu/faculty/DeLay/.

Christine Leigh Heyrman is Associate Professor of History at the University of Delaware. She received a Ph.D. in American Studies from Yale University and is the author of Commerce and Culture: The Maritime Communities of Colonial Massachusetts, 1690-1750. Her book exploring the evolution of religious culture in the Southern U.S., entitled Southern Cross: The Beginnings of the Bible Belt, was awarded the Bancroft Prize in 1998.

Mark H. Lytle received his Ph.D. from Yale University and is Professor of History and Environmental Studies. he has served two years as Mary Ball Washington Professor of American History at University College, Dublin, in Ireland. His publications include The Origins of the Iranian-American Alliance, 1941-1953, After the Fact: The Art of Historical Detection (with James West Davidson), America's Uncivil Wars: The Sixties Era from Elvis to the Fall of Richard Nixon, and, most recently, The Gentle Subversive: Rachel Carson, Silent Spring, and the Rise of the Environmental Movement. He is co-editor of a joint issue of the journals of Diplomatic History and Environmental History dedicated to the field of environmental diplomacy.

Michael B. Stoff is Associate Professor of History and Director of the Plan II Honors Program at the University of Texas at Austin. The recipient of a Ph.D. from Yale University, he has been honored many times for his teaching, most recently with election to the Academy of Distinguished Teachers. He is the author of Oil, War, and American Security: The Search for a National Policy on Foreign Oil,1941-1947, co-editor (with Jonathan Fanton and R. Hal Williams) of The Manhattan Project: A Documentary Introduction to the Atomic Age, and series co-editor (with James West Davidson) of the Oxford New Narratives in American History. He is currently working on a narrative on the bombing of Nagasaki.