OERs: Right for Community Colleges (2) Things I Like about The American Yawp

I began teaching American History at Amarillo College in the Fall of 2018. Not long after that, I adopted The American Yawp as the textbook for the two-semester survey. There were several reasons behind that decision.

First, as I mentioned in the previous post, The AY is an online OER. It's freely available to anyone with a connection to the Internet.

Second, the textbook was written by credentialed American historians. So it's a legitimate survey, a worthy synthesis of what we know about America's past.

Third, after this resource became widely-used, Stanford University Press saw fit to print the secondary (textbook) material in two separate volumes. Chapters 1-15 of The AY correspond to the "first half" (up to 1877) of American history. Chapters 16-30 correspond to the "second half" (since 1877). The two printed volumes match up with that division. Again, they include all of what the historian-authors of this textbook wrote. So, if a student prefers or needs to read print on paper, the print edition is available at a reasonable cost. 

However, what the print volumes do not include are the primary sources featured in every chapter of the book. Those are available only in the online edition. To illustrate, the print edition contains all of the text that's visible when you access the online edition of Chapter 1.  But, the top of the chapter table of contents, note that section VI. is titled "Primary Sources." Clicking on that link takes the reader to a list of nine primary sources keyed to the subject matter of Chapter 1. Here's the link to the Chapter 1 Primary Sources. None of these appear in the online edition. So, when an instructor assigns some of the primary sources, those can be read only in the online edition.