A distinctive narrative emphasizes the experiences of working people. Who Built America reinterprets American history "from the bottom up" by focusing on the great majority of the American population — its workers — at every phase of the country’s development. The authors define "working people" broadly to include groups from wage earners and independent farm families to artisans, day laborers, domestic workers, and slaves. This approach allows them to present the more traditional political and diplomatic story of American history in a new light.
Compelling themes explain working Americans’ changing world. Each volume is organized into three theme-driven parts that examine major socioeconomic eras, like the simultaneous expansion of "Free Labor and Slavery" (Volume One, Part II), and the late-nineteenth-century age of "Monopoly and Upheaval" (Volume Two, Part I). Throughout each volume, the authors pay particular attention to a number of resonant themes like the endurance of racism and sexism in American society, the changing meanings of democracy and citizenship, the growth of the federal government and its changing role in the economy and the lives of workers, and the profound effects of industrialization and globalization on American workers and the workplace.
Visuals both fresh and familiar help tell the story. Building upon the original inspiration to select images that working people might have viewed themselves, the narrative is supplemented by photographs, sketches, paintings, cartoons, lithographs, and stereographs from books, pamphlets, newspapers, magazines, broadsides, and personal collections. The new edition now includes more depictions of artifacts, visual representations of material culture that offer a more tangible sense of the physical context of workers’ lives. Extended captions provide a stronger connection to the narrative.
Documents from a wide range of sources convey the experiences and voices of working people. The authors augment the narrative with excerpts from letters, diaries, memoirs, poems, songs, newspaper and magazine articles, fiction, court records, and transcribed oral histories — texts that allow working people to speak for themselves.