About This Book¶

Welcome from Lex¶

Hello, future citizens! I'm Lex, your bald eagle guide through the laws, institutions, and ideas that hold American democracy together. This book covers everything from the Framers' debates in Philadelphia to today's questions about artificial intelligence in federal agencies. Whether you're preparing for the AP exam or just want to understand how your government actually works, you're in the right place. "The law belongs to all of us!" — so let's learn it together.

Why This Intelligent Textbook¶

Civic knowledge is a cornerstone of self-governance — yet by nearly every measure, American students are not getting enough of it.

In the United States:

Only 22% of 8th graders scored at or above Proficient in civics on the 2022 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), the lowest score since the assessment was redesigned in 2006.¹
In Annenberg Public Policy Center's 2023 annual civics survey, fewer than half of American adults could correctly name all three branches of the federal government — a drop from prior years.²
The College Board reports that more than 330,000 students enrolled in AP US Government and Politics in the 2022–23 school year, yet fewer than 50% earned a passing score of 3 or higher on the exam.³
The iCivics "Educating for American Democracy" initiative found that many states still teach civics primarily through lecture and textbook recall, with fewer than 20% of students experiencing authentic civic action or inquiry-based learning in the classroom.⁴

Worldwide:

Freedom House's Freedom in the World 2024 report documented that global democracy has declined for 18 consecutive years, with civic institutions weakening across more than 50 countries — underscoring the urgency of civic education as a democratic survival skill.⁵
UNESCO's 2023 Global Citizenship Education framework identifies civic literacy as a core competency for the 21st century and calls for curriculum reform in more than 100 member states.⁶

These numbers represent millions of students — including yours — who will soon vote, serve on juries, and make policy decisions without the tools to reason critically about the institutions they inherit. This textbook exists to close that gap.

This book takes a fundamentally different approach from a traditional civics textbook. It is built on a learning graph of 200 interconnected concepts organized across all twelve major topic areas of the AP curriculum. Concepts are introduced in the order their prerequisites are established, so understanding accumulates naturally from chapter to chapter rather than jumping arbitrarily between topics. Throughout the book you will find 20 interactive MicroSims — browser-based simulations that let students manipulate models, explore timelines, trace the legislative process step by step, and discover constitutional principles through experimentation rather than memorization. The entire textbook is open source and free — no paywalls, no access codes, no expensive annual editions that make last year's copy obsolete.

A Government in Need of Repair¶

The case for civic education is not just academic — it is urgent. Two independent measures, one from American citizens and one from international observers, tell the same story: trust in the U.S. federal government is collapsing, and its global reputation is sliding with it. The institutions today's students will soon inherit need repair, and that repair will only come from citizens who understand them well enough to fix them.

Trust in the U.S. Federal Government Has Collapsed¶

In 1964, more than three out of every four Americans said they trusted the federal government to do what is right "just about always" or "most of the time." Today fewer than one in five do. The chart below tracks the collapse year by year using Pew Research Center surveys spanning 1958 to 2025.

The decline is bipartisan and structural. It survived the Reagan recovery, the post-9/11 surge of national unity, and every change in party control of the White House. Sustained low trust corrodes the legitimacy democratic institutions need to function — it weakens voluntary compliance with laws, drives talented people away from public service, and creates openings for demagogues who promise to "tear it all down." Reversing the trend will not happen by accident.

How the World Ranks American Integrity¶

International observers are noticing the slide. Transparency International's Corruption Perceptions Index — the most widely cited cross-country measure of public-sector integrity — now ranks the United States 29th out of 182 countries. Among the 30 wealthy democracies the U.S. most resembles, it sits near the bottom of the list.

The United States once led on this measure. As recently as 2015 it scored 76 — comparable to today's Australia or Ireland. The 12-point drop since then reflects erosion of campaign-finance limits, weakened government oversight, and partisan capture of regulatory agencies. The countries ranked above the U.S. — Denmark, Finland, the Netherlands, Canada — are not wealthier or more democratic in any deep sense. They simply maintain stronger anti-corruption guardrails. America once had those guardrails. They can be rebuilt.

Why This Falls to You¶

These charts are not meant to discourage. They are meant to make clear why civic education has become urgent. The students who use this textbook will, within a decade, be voting and running for office, serving on juries, working in federal and state agencies, and organizing in their communities. The institutions you are about to study are repairable — but only by citizens who understand them well enough to fix them. That is the work this book is preparing you to do.

How to Use This Book¶

This textbook is designed for self-paced study aligned with the AP US Government and Politics curriculum. Each chapter builds on previous material, so reading in order is recommended. The book includes:

12 Chapters covering the foundations of democracy, the Constitution, federalism, all three branches of the federal government, civil liberties and civil rights, political opinion and media, elections and participation, and the impact of artificial intelligence on government
20 Interactive MicroSims embedded in chapters — browser-based simulations you can manipulate to explore checks and balances, trace civil rights milestones, visualize the Electoral College map, and more
Quizzes at the end of each chapter to test understanding before moving on
Annotated References linking to Wikipedia and authoritative primary sources for every major topic
Glossary with definitions for every key concept
Learning Graph visualizing all 200 concept dependencies across the curriculum
Search available from any page using the search bar at the top

The Learning Graph is especially useful if you want to explore non-linearly or verify that you have the prerequisites for a specific concept before diving in.

About the Author¶

Dan McCreary is a semi-retired AI researcher, solution architect, and educator who has spent more than three decades helping Fortune 100 organizations reason over massive datasets. At Optum he founded the Generative AI Center of Excellence and led the team that built one of the world's largest healthcare knowledge graphs — spanning over 25 billion vertices — to unify member, provider, and patient insights. Dan's deep background in knowledge representation and systems thinking underpins the precise learning graphs and intelligent textbook workflows used throughout this course.

He is the co-author of Making Sense of NoSQL (Manning Publications), the founding chair of the NoSQL Now! conference, and a frequent keynote speaker on semantic search, ontology strategy, and AI hardware. Beyond industry, Dan has mentored students as a STEM volunteer since 2014 and now applies the same rigor to building open educational resources. You can explore the Intelligent Textbooks Case Studies to see over 87 textbooks that Dan has created or co-created with other authors.

Selected Credentials

B.A. in Physics and Computer Science, Carleton College
M.S.E.E., University of Minnesota
MBA coursework, University of St. Thomas
Patent holder in semantic search and ontology management techniques
Advocate for large-scale Enterprise Knowledge Graph adoption across healthcare and education
Long-time promoter of accessible, low-cost AI-powered learning experiences

How to Cite This Book¶

If you reference this textbook in academic work, curriculum proposals, lesson plans, or other publications, please use one of the following citation formats.

APA (7th edition)

McCreary, D. (2026). US Government. https://dmccreary.github.io/us-government/

Chicago (17th edition)

McCreary, Dan. 2026. US Government. https://dmccreary.github.io/us-government/.

MLA (9th edition)

McCreary, Dan. US Government. 2026, dmccreary.github.io/us-government/.

BibTeX

@book{mccreary2026usgovernment,
  title  = {US Government},
  author = {McCreary, Dan},
  year   = {2026},
  url    = {https://dmccreary.github.io/us-government/},
  note   = {Interactive intelligent textbook}
}

To cite a specific chapter, append the chapter number and title — for example:

McCreary, D. (2026). Chapter 1: Foundations of American Democracy. In US Government. https://dmccreary.github.io/us-government/chapters/01-foundations-of-democracy/

License¶

This work is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0). You are free to share and adapt the material for non-commercial purposes as long as you give appropriate credit and share your adaptations under the same license.

References¶

National Center for Education Statistics. (2022). NAEP Civics: National Results Overview. U.S. Department of Education. https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/civics/ ↩
Annenberg Public Policy Center. (2023). Civics Knowledge Survey. University of Pennsylvania. https://www.annenbergpublicpolicycenter.org/political-communication/civics-knowledge-survey/ ↩
College Board. (2023). AP Program Participation and Performance Data 2023. https://research.collegeboard.org/programs/ap/data ↩
iCivics & Educating for American Democracy. (2021). Educating for American Democracy: Excellence in History and Civics for All Learners. https://www.educatingforamericandemocracy.org/ ↩
Freedom House. (2024). Freedom in the World 2024: The Mounting Damage of Flawed Elections and Armed Conflict. https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-world/2024/mounting-damage-flawed-elections-and-armed-conflict ↩
UNESCO. (2023). Global Citizenship Education: Preparing Learners for the Challenges of the 21st Century. https://www.unesco.org/en/global-citizenship-peace-education ↩