Skip to content

About This Book

Welcome from Liberty

Welcome! I'm Liberty, your guide through the remarkable, complex, and sometimes surprising story of the United States. This book doesn't ask you to memorize dates — it asks you to think like a historian. Together we'll examine evidence, spot patterns across centuries, and wrestle with the messy, unresolved questions that make American history so worth studying. As Liberty always says: "Let's investigate the evidence!"

Why This Intelligent Textbook

American history is not a collection of facts to be memorized and forgotten after an exam — it is a living analytical framework for understanding the present. The forces that shaped the Declaration of Independence, the Civil War, the New Deal, and the Civil Rights Movement are still operating today, often in forms that only become visible when students know where to look. Yet most students encounter history as a list of dates and names rather than as a discipline that builds genuine analytical power.

In the United States (2022–2025):

  • Only 13% of 8th graders scored at or above the Proficient level on the 2022 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) U.S. History exam — down from 18% in 2018, the steepest single-cycle decline in the assessment's history.1
  • Average NAEP U.S. History scores fell in all three grades tested (4th, 8th, and 12th) between 2018 and 2022, a drop that education researchers attribute to pandemic-era learning disruption and reduced instructional time for social studies in favor of tested subjects.2
  • A national survey by the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation found that only 36% of Americans could pass a basic U.S. civics test — the same test required for naturalized citizenship — with only 27% of respondents under age 45 achieving a passing score.3
  • More than 550,000 students take the AP United States History exam each year, making it one of the most widely taken Advanced Placement exams in the country — yet fewer than half earn a score of 3 or above, reflecting a persistent gap between enrollment and mastery.4

Worldwide:

  • A landmark study by the Stanford History Education Group found that most U.S. middle and high school students showed a "troubling" inability to evaluate digital historical sources — unable to distinguish mainstream news from sponsored content, identify the authority behind historical claims, or perform basic lateral reading — skills that depend directly on the kind of historical media literacy this textbook explicitly teaches.5
  • UNESCO identifies history and civic education as foundational to social cohesion and the prevention of violent extremism, recommending that curricula move beyond factual recall toward critical inquiry, source evaluation, and empathy-building through the study of historical evidence — precisely the pedagogical framework this book is built around.6

These numbers represent millions of students who graduate without the analytical tools to evaluate political claims, understand institutional change, or recognize the historical roots of today's headlines. This textbook exists to close that gap — not by adding more content to memorize, but by teaching history as a set of transferable thinking skills.

This book takes a fundamentally different approach. It is built on a learning graph of 450 interconnected concepts organized into 21 chronological chapters. Concepts are introduced in the order their prerequisites are established, so understanding builds naturally from colonial origins through the Age of AI. Throughout the book you will find 36 interactive MicroSims — browser-based simulations that let students explore causal loop diagrams, trace feedback loops in historical systems, and discover patterns through experimentation rather than memorization. The entire textbook is open source and free — no paywalls, no access codes, no expensive annual editions.

How to Use This Book

This textbook is designed for self-paced study. Each chapter builds on previous material, so reading in order is recommended for first-time students. The book includes:

  • 21 Chapters covering the full sweep of U.S. history from pre-Columbian contact through the Age of AI, organized into chronological periods aligned with rigorous high school and AP U.S. History frameworks
  • 36 Interactive MicroSims embedded in chapters — browser-based simulations you can manipulate to explore causal relationships, feedback dynamics, and historical patterns
  • Chapter Quizzes at the end of each chapter to check understanding and reinforce key concepts
  • Annotated References linking to Wikipedia and authoritative primary and secondary sources
  • Glossary with definitions for every key concept introduced in the course
  • FAQ with common student questions and thorough answers
  • Learning Graph visualizing 450 concept dependencies across all 21 chapters
  • Full-text Search available from every page using the search bar at the top

The Learning Graph visualizes how concepts connect across the full course. If you want to explore non-linearly or check prerequisites for a specific topic, start there.

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 visit 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 from Carleton College
  • M.S.E.E. from the University of Minnesota
  • MBA coursework at the 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). U.S. History. https://dmccreary.github.io/us-history/

Chicago (17th edition)

McCreary, Dan. 2026. U.S. History. https://dmccreary.github.io/us-history/.

MLA (9th edition)

McCreary, Dan. U.S. History. 2026, dmccreary.github.io/us-history/.

BibTeX

@book{mccreary2026ushistory,
  title     = {U.S. History},
  author    = {McCreary, Dan},
  year      = {2026},
  url       = {https://dmccreary.github.io/us-history/},
  note      = {Interactive intelligent textbook}
}

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

McCreary, D. (2026). Chapter 1: Historical Methods. In U.S. History. https://dmccreary.github.io/us-history/chapters/01-historical-methods/

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

  1. National Center for Education Statistics. (2022). NAEP Report Card: 2022 NAEP U.S. History Assessment. U.S. Department of Education. https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/highlights/ushistory/2022/ ↩

  2. National Center for Education Statistics. (2022). The Nation's Report Card: U.S. History 2022. U.S. Department of Education. https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/ushistory/ ↩

  3. Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation. (2018). National Survey Finds Just 1 in 3 Americans Would Pass a Civics Test. https://woodrow.org/news/national-survey-finds-just-1-in-3-americans-would-pass-civics-test/ ↩

  4. College Board. (2024). AP United States History: Program Summary Report. https://apstudents.collegeboard.org/courses/ap-united-states-history ↩

  5. Stanford History Education Group. (2021). Civic Online Reasoning: A National Portrait of Students' Lateral Reading Skills. Stanford University. https://cor.stanford.edu/ ↩

  6. UNESCO. (2017). Education for Democratic Citizenship and Human Rights Education. United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. https://www.unesco.org/en/education/global-citizenship ↩