Our free 8th grade history textbook offers an unparalleled survey of the history and government of the American people. In addition to covering the early history of the United States in detail, this book includes an extensive exploration of the Constitution of the United States and the government it establishes.
Why this Book Exists
As fellow parents, we created this book out of necessity. At the time of writing, Syd is pregnant with our fourth child, our two-year-old has recently learned how to open safety gates, and I’m working through the onboarding process to take on a part-time role as a university lecturer. Creating a detailed textbook on American history and government was never really something we anticipated doing with our very limited free time. If we believed that there were existing resources to adequately meet this need, we never would have made Journey Into the Foundations of America.
Unfortunately, the state of American history and civics education is dire. Many homeschool parents are well aware of the growing level of politicization within school textbooks, with American history being perhaps targeted more forcefully than any other subject. Although much attention has been given to this problem, we suggest that there is another problem of similar importance, which has received far less attention in the homeschool community: children today simply aren’t expected to learn as much about their nation’s history as previous generations. We have performed an extensive review of history textbooks written in the 1920s and earlier, and have concluded that modern textbooks—whether written with public schools or homeschoolers in mind—do not come anywhere close to the same level of depth.
This endeavor began when we purchased a popular (and expensive!) high school American history curriculum for our own children. When we began to read it ourselves, we were surprised that it seemed quite infantile compared to the advertised grade level. Upon comparing it with older history books, we discovered that its level of academic rigor roughly corresponded to what educators a century earlier covered in 5th grade. This isn’t an outlier; we’ve examined many other popular products, and found that most high school history textbooks would be more properly categorized as late elementary school / early middle school. There’s no way around the conclusion that modern standards for learning are embarrassingly low.
Journey Into the Foundations of America is our attempt to help fix this problem. We have designed this textbook to achieve similar rigor to 8th grade textbooks from the early twentieth century, with much of the text being fact-checked, modified, and expanded from John Clark Ridpath’s History of the United States (published in 1911). We’ve also incorporated contributions from a number of additional resources that were commonly used in schools at the time (see the Acknowledgements section for a complete listing). Ideally, we suggest using this book for 8th or 9th grade, as doing so will put students well on their way towards taking a college-level course on American history later in high school. Nonetheless, you can use this curriculum at any point in high school, and your child will still finish at a more advanced level than most of their peers.
What Makes this Book Different
Aside from its overall higher level of sophistication, this book offers many advantages over other available resources:
- It covers the Constitution of the United States in great detail, including the Constitutional Convention, the ratification debates, and the government system it establishes. In addition to being a history curriculum, this book provides a full civics education; by the end of this course, your child will understand how the government works far better than most adults.
- It covers the colonial period extensively. We’ve observed that most modern history textbooks speed through the colonial period very rapidly. Most Americans grow up barely knowing anything about William Penn and Roger Williams, let alone Edmund Andros or James Oglethorpe. It’s frighteningly common for textbooks to devote a mere sentence or two to King William’s War, Queen Anne’s War, and King George’s War. The history of the colonial period is rich, fascinating, and essential for understanding the course of America’s development—and Journey Into the Foundations of America gives this era its proper due.
- It covers warfare. One remarkably unfortunate trend among modern history teachers is a general contempt for describing the importance of major battles and the individual heroism of the men who fought them. One immediate consequence of this modern approach is that it removes from history the sections that are most engaging to boys and young men. Furthermore, we believe that one of the primary purposes of a history education is to help students appreciate the sacrifices that secured the freedoms we now enjoy. This book describes many of the key battles of American history in detail, and remembers the patriotic sacrifices that created this nation.
- It asks questions more productively. One of the first things students will notice about our textbook is that the end-of-chapter questions can reference any previous chapter in the book—not just the chapter they appear in. This is an important feature of our book, which takes advantage of one of the most fundamental realities of learning: specifically, students learn better when they are asked to repeatedly revisit information over a period of time, rather than trying to intensely drill themselves on a handful of recently introduced facts. By asking students about things they may have read about weeks earlier, we ensure that they are continually reinforcing what they have learned. Moreover, the questions we ask are specifically designed to help prepare students for the types of questions that are common on standardized examinations for early college credit. Indeed, a primary goal of this course is to put students in an advantageous position for obtaining college credit at a later point in high school.
Using this Book
Journey Into the Foundations of America is intended to be used throughout a full grade level (ideally 8th grade), and covers America’s history from the first European explorations to the year 1914. Because it includes lengthy discussions of American civics, you can count it as both your history and humanities curriculum for this grade level. We are in the process of developing a follow-up, Journey Into Pax Americana, which will cover America’s contributions to the world from 1914 to the present.
The book is divided into 79 chapters. You don’t need to do any preparatory work before each chapter; simply give your child the book and let them read. Aim to go through at least two chapters per week.
At the end of every chapter, your child should write out an answer to each of the end-of-chapter questions. As mentioned earlier, these questions often reference people or events described in much earlier portions of the book. Your child should first make a genuine effort to answer the questions without looking back at the text. If they struggle to provide adequate answers, it’s okay to look for the necessary information in the book (the index section at the end will prove helpful for this purpose). Whether they
need to look up the information or not, your student should write the answer to each question. Although it’s obviously preferable if your child immediately knows the answer to each question, the real point of this exercise is to help them put effort into retrieving and reinforcing their knowledge. Don’t worry if they frequently need to reference the textbook, but ensure that they spend a couple of minutes seriously thinking beforehand. You can find example answers to these questions on our website, along with many other helpful resources.
Journey Into the Foundations of America also includes 6 document studies. In each document study, students are given one or more historical documents to read. They are then asked to write an essay about some particular aspect of the document(s) in the reading. We suggest that you allow your student to reference the rest of the textbook while working on the essay. You can decide how long these essays should be, but we suggest that they should be at least 400 words (if you are using this textbook at a higher level than 8th or 9th grade, they should be a bit longer). The most important thing is that the essay should answer the question in a thoughtful way that demonstrates critical thinking skills.
Download the Book Here
Please click the button below in order to download a free PDF of Journey Into the Foundations of America.
Purchasable Physical Copies are in Progress
We are currently working to make physical copies of the textbook available for purchase, and will update this section with purchase links when they are available.
Answers to the End-of-Chapter Questions
A full list of answers to all of the end-of-chapter questions is available here.
