This textbook works differently than other history books you have read.
Most history books say things like “America was founded on freedom” or “The nation demanded independence.” But stop. What do these words actually point at?
Can “America” want something? No. “America” describes lines drawn on maps by certain persons. Can a “nation” demand anything? No. “Nation” describes a story that certain persons tell about themselves. Can “freedom” found anything? No. “Freedom” describes a feeling some persons have when other persons stop interfering with their actions.
When your teacher says “America fought for freedom,” ask yourself:
Who actually fought? Specific persons fought—persons with names, with families, with reasons of their own. Some fought because they wanted to. Some fought because other persons forced them. Some fought for money. Some died without knowing why.
What did they fight for? Each person had different goals. Some wanted to stop paying taxes to a king across the ocean. Some wanted to take land from indigenous persons. Some wanted to keep enslaving other persons without interference. The word “freedom” hides all these different desires behind a single pleasant-sounding label.
This book tells history by showing you what specific persons actually did, and asking: who benefited? We never say things like “was” or “is.” We use active verbs instead. This helps you see who DID things, rather than hiding actors behind descriptions.
More importantly: we dissolve the big words. When other books say “rights,” we ask: which persons agreed to stop interfering with which other persons, and why? When other books say “justice,” we ask: which persons did what to which other persons, and who decided to call it “just”?
Why does this matter? Because the big words—the ones that sound noble and important—often hide who benefits and who suffers. Persons who hold power LIKE these big words. “The nation requires your sacrifice” sounds better than “wealthy persons want you to die so they can keep their wealth.”
Let’s begin.
Before Europeans arrived, millions of persons lived across the land we now call North America. They belonged to hundreds of different groups—Cherokee, Lakota, Navajo, Iroquois, and many others. Each group had developed its own way of living over thousands of years.
These persons built cities, farmed, hunted, traded, made art, raised children, and governed themselves. The Haudenosaunee created a confederation where representatives from different groups met to make decisions together. They developed ways of reaching agreement that some historians think influenced the persons who later wrote the U.S. Constitution—though we cannot know what those writers actually thought.
Later textbook writers often called these persons “primitive” or “savage.” Notice what those words do. They rank persons—placing European ways at the top and other ways at the bottom. Ask: who made this ranking? Who benefits from it? Persons who wanted to take indigenous lands found it convenient to call the people living there “primitive.” That label made taking their land seem acceptable, even generous—”civilizing the savages.”
But the Lakota developed sophisticated methods for hunting buffalo. The Pueblo peoples engineered complex irrigation systems. Persons in the Mississippian culture built massive earthen mounds, some larger than Egyptian pyramids. These persons solved difficult problems, created beauty, loved their families, and lived full lives—lives that differed from European lives but lacked nothing essential.
In 1492, a sailor named Christopher Columbus, working for the Spanish monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella, led three ships across the Atlantic Ocean. He hoped to find a western route to Asia. Instead, he landed in the Caribbean.
Columbus and his crews encountered the Taíno people. What happened next shows how persons with weapons often treat persons without them. Columbus wrote in his journal about how easily the Taíno could become servants. Spanish colonizers who followed him forced Taíno persons to mine gold. They killed those who resisted. They brought diseases that devastated populations.
Other European persons followed. English merchants founded Jamestown in 1607, seeking profit. The Jamestown colonists nearly starved until local Powhatan persons taught them how to grow food. Later, the colonists turned on the Powhatan, taking their land by force.
Persons who called themselves Pilgrims founded Plymouth Colony in 1620. They had left England because King James I threatened to punish them for worshipping differently than he preferred. The Wampanoag people, led by a sachem named Massasoit, helped them survive their first winter. Later generations of colonists repaid this help by taking Wampanoag lands and killing Wampanoag persons who resisted.
Notice: “religious freedom” never loaded a ship. Specific persons wanted to worship without other persons punishing them. So they left. They made choices. They took actions. And when they gained power, many of them punished OTHER persons for worshipping differently—just as they had themselves experienced punishment.
Starting in the early 1600s, European traders bought captured African persons and transported them across the Atlantic Ocean. This trade in human beings lasted over 300 years.
Ship captains packed kidnapped Africans into cargo holds. Many died during the crossing—from disease, from despair, from violence. Those who survived faced a lifetime of forced labor. Enslavers—persons who claimed to own other persons—beat, whipped, and killed their captives. They separated families. They worked people to death. They raped women and claimed their children as property.
Why did this happen? Because specific persons chose money over the lives of other persons. Ship captains transported enslaved persons because merchants paid them. Plantation owners bought enslaved persons because those persons’ labor made the owners rich. Politicians who held official positions protected enslavement because enslavers held power and paid bribes.
Many textbooks say “slavery existed” or “slavery became an institution.” But notice how those phrases hide the actors. PERSONS enslaved other persons. PERSONS bought and sold human beings. PERSONS whipped and raped and murdered. The abstraction “slavery” never raised a whip. Specific persons did—persons with names, persons whose descendants still hold wealth built from stolen labor.
Over four hundred years, persons captured, transported, and enslaved approximately 12.5 million Africans. Certain families grew enormously wealthy from this theft of human beings and their labor. That wealth passed down through generations. It still affects who holds money and power today.
By the 1760s, about two million colonists lived in British North America. King George III and the persons advising him wanted these colonists to pay taxes to help cover war debts. The colonists had no one speaking for them in Parliament—the group of wealthy British persons who made laws.
Some colonists organized resistance. Samuel Adams formed groups called Sons of Liberty in Boston. They harassed tax collectors and destroyed taxed goods. On December 16, 1773, Adams and other colonists, disguised as Mohawk warriors, dumped 342 chests of tea into Boston Harbor.
King George’s ministers responded by sending soldiers to occupy Boston. This angered more colonists. Persons in other colonies began organizing together.
In April 1775, British soldiers marched toward Concord, Massachusetts to seize weapons that colonists had stockpiled. Colonist militiamen met them at Lexington. Someone fired a shot—no one knows who—and fighting began.
A year later, a committee of five persons—including Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and John Adams—drafted a document explaining why the colonies should separate from Britain. Jefferson did most of the writing. On July 4, 1776, representatives from thirteen colonies voted to approve this Declaration of Independence.
The Declaration contains phrases about “all men” having certain things that cannot be taken away. But look at who wrote these words and how they lived. Jefferson enslaved over 600 persons during his lifetime. He wrote about persons not interfering with each other while forcing other human beings to labor without pay, beating them when they refused, selling their children.
Does this hypocrisy diminish the value of those ideas? That depends on YOU. But always ask: Who wrote these words? What did they actually DO? Who benefited from the nice-sounding language, and who continued to suffer?
After winning independence through eight years of fighting, the former colonists faced a question: how should they make decisions together?
In 1787, fifty-five men gathered in Philadelphia to write a new Constitution—a document describing how persons holding official positions would make rules and enforce them. These fifty-five men included wealthy lawyers, merchants, and landowners. No women attended. No African Americans—enslaved or free—attended. No indigenous persons attended.
These fifty-five men argued for months about how to distribute power among themselves and their allies. Persons representing more populous colonies wanted more influence based on population. Persons representing less populous colonies wanted equal influence regardless of size. They compromised by creating two groups—the House of Representatives (based on population) and the Senate (equal per colony).
The thorniest debates concerned enslaved persons. Delegates from Southern colonies wanted enslaved persons counted for purposes of representation—which would give Southern colonies more influence—while not allowing those persons any voice. Delegates from Northern colonies objected, though many also profited from trading goods produced by enslaved labor.
They compromised: each enslaved person would count as three-fifths of a free person for representation purposes. This arrangement gave slaveholding colonies extra influence for decades.
The writers of the Constitution never put the word “slave” or “enslavement” in their document. They chose vaguer terms like “other persons” and “such persons.” Perhaps they felt shame. Perhaps they simply wanted to hide what they had done behind respectable language.
Throughout the 1800s, persons of European descent moved westward, claiming lands where indigenous persons had lived for millennia.
Sometimes they bought land from indigenous groups—though these “purchases” often involved trickery, threats, or getting indigenous leaders drunk before signing documents. Sometimes they simply took land by force. Sometimes persons holding official positions in the U.S. signed agreements with indigenous leaders, then broke those agreements when white settlers wanted more land.
In 1830, President Andrew Jackson signed an order authorizing soldiers to force indigenous peoples from the southeastern states. Soldiers marched Cherokee, Muscogee, Seminole, Chickasaw, and Choctaw persons hundreds of miles to designated territory west of the Mississippi River. Thousands died during these marches—from cold, from hunger, from despair. The Cherokee call this the Trail of Tears.
Who did this? Andrew Jackson signed the order. Soldiers carried out the removals—pushing old persons forward at gunpoint, leaving the dead unburied. White settlers moved onto the emptied lands. Georgia politicians lobbied for removal because their constituents wanted Cherokee land and gold.
Newspaper writers invented a phrase: “Manifest Destiny.” They claimed that European-descended persons had a special calling to spread across the continent. But “destiny” never forced anyone to march. Persons with guns did. The fancy phrase just made theft and murder sound noble.
The 1848 discovery of gold at Sutter’s Mill in California brought hundreds of thousands of migrants westward. Indigenous Californians suffered catastrophically—their population dropped from approximately 150,000 to 30,000 within two decades as miners murdered them, destroyed their food sources, and spread diseases. Persons holding official positions in California paid bounties for indigenous scalps and ears.
Railroad companies recruited Chinese laborers to build the transcontinental railroad. These workers dynamited through mountains, laid track through deserts, and died by the hundreds in accidents and avalanches. When the railroad finished in 1869, politicians posed for photographs while the Chinese workers who built it stood excluded from the frame.
By 1860, approximately four million African Americans lived in bondage, mostly in Southern states. Enslaved persons picked cotton, the most valuable U.S. export. Southern planters had grown immensely wealthy from this forced labor. Northern factory owners had grown wealthy processing Southern cotton.
Some Northern persons—called abolitionists—argued that persons should not enslave other persons. Frederick Douglass, who had escaped from enslavement, gave speeches describing the brutality he had witnessed and endured. Harriet Tubman returned to the South repeatedly, guiding approximately seventy enslaved persons northward through networks of safe houses.
Some Southern persons argued that their wealth depended on enslaved labor and threatened to leave the Union if Northern politicians tried to limit enslavement’s expansion.
In November 1860, voters elected Abraham Lincoln as President. Lincoln opposed expanding enslavement into new territories. Within months, politicians in eleven Southern states voted to leave the Union and form their own group called the Confederate States of America. Soldiers fighting for the Confederacy attacked Fort Sumter in April 1861. The bloodiest war in American history began.
Over four years, approximately 620,000 soldiers died—more than in all other U.S. wars combined. Soldiers shot, stabbed, and shelled each other. Disease killed even more than combat. Generals made decisions that sent thousands to their deaths.
Enslaved persons did not simply wait for others to help them. Approximately 180,000 Black men served in the Union Army. They fought despite receiving lower pay than white soldiers and facing execution if captured by Confederate soldiers.
Soldiers fighting for the Union eventually won the war. Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, declaring enslaved persons in Confederate-held territory free. The Thirteenth Amendment, added to the Constitution in 1865, prohibited one person from owning another throughout the country.
But freeing four million persons raised immediate questions: Where would they live? How would they earn money? Would other persons let them vote, own property, testify in court?
During the period called Reconstruction, federal troops occupied former Confederate states. African Americans voted, held official positions, started businesses, and attended schools—many for the first time. Black persons served in Congress.
But many white Southerners violently opposed these changes. Persons formed terrorist groups like the Ku Klux Klan. They burned Black churches and schools. They beat, whipped, and murdered Black persons who voted, acquired property, or showed “disrespect” to whites.
By 1877, Northern politicians had lost interest in Reconstruction. They struck a deal allowing Southern white persons to regain control of state positions. Federal troops withdrew. Southern legislators then passed laws that stripped Black persons of the ability to vote and mandated racial separation in all public spaces.
For the next ninety years, Southern states operated under a system of legal apartheid. White persons could terrorize Black persons with little fear of consequences. Persons holding official positions called this system “separate but equal”—but the separate facilities provided for Black persons received far less money and far less care.
In the decades after the Civil War, persons built factories that changed how other persons lived and worked across the country.
Factory owners built vast manufacturing operations: steel mills, textile plants, meatpacking facilities, railroad networks. They employed millions of workers—many of them immigrants from Ireland, Italy, Poland, China, and elsewhere. These workers often labored 12-16 hours per day, six or seven days per week, in dangerous conditions.
A small number of persons accumulated enormous wealth during this period. John D. Rockefeller controlled most of the country’s oil refining. Andrew Carnegie dominated steel production. J.P. Morgan commanded banking. These men and others like them built mansions and art collections. They also crushed competitors, bribed politicians, and fought workers viciously when workers demanded better treatment.
Workers organized to demand better conditions. They formed unions. They went on strike—refusing to work until employers met their demands. Factory owners often responded with violence. They hired thugs to beat strikers. They persuaded persons holding official positions to send soldiers against workers. During the 1892 Homestead Strike, company guards and workers exchanged gunfire; ten persons died.
Notice how textbooks often describe this period: “Industry grew.” “The economy expanded.” But “industry” never grew anything. Specific persons—owners, workers, engineers—built specific things. The abstraction “the economy” never laid a railroad track. Irish and Chinese laborers did, often dying in the process.
In the twentieth century, U.S. military personnel participated in two massive wars in Europe and Asia.
The first global war (1914-1918) began when rulers of European nations ordered their soldiers to attack each other. A Serbian nationalist assassinated an Austrian archduke. Rulers of Austria-Hungary ordered soldiers to attack Serbia. Because rulers of various nations had promised to support each other, they sent their soldiers to fight when their allies fought—dragging millions into combat.
President Woodrow Wilson initially kept U.S. soldiers out. But German submarine crews sank ships carrying Americans, and British propagandists worked to shift opinions. In 1917, Wilson asked Congress to declare war. He claimed the U.S. would fight to “make the world safe for democracy”—a phrase that sounds noble until you ask: what does it mean?
“Democracy” describes a system where persons count ballots to determine which other persons will hold official positions. The persons holding positions then make rules. But Wilson’s allies—rulers of Britain and France—controlled vast colonial empires where they denied any voice to millions of persons. Indian persons, African persons, Vietnamese persons had no say in their own governance. So “making the world safe for democracy” really meant: helping certain rulers defeat other rulers.
Approximately 116,000 U.S. soldiers died in the war. Millions more died across Europe. Young men charged into machine gun fire because officers ordered them to and military police shot deserters. They choked on poison gas—chemicals designed to burn lungs and blind eyes. They drowned in muddy trenches. Generals, sitting in comfortable headquarters behind the lines, ordered attacks they knew would fail because they had run out of ideas.
The second global war (1939-1945) began when German soldiers under Adolf Hitler invaded Poland. Hitler and his Nazi party had murdered opponents, stripped Jewish persons of all protections, and planned to conquer much of Europe. They blamed Jewish persons for Germany’s problems—a lie that many German persons found convenient to believe because it gave them someone to hate and someone to rob.
The Nazis systematically murdered approximately six million Jewish persons, plus millions of Roma, disabled persons, homosexuals, and political prisoners. They built facilities designed to kill human beings as efficiently as possible. They worked prisoners to death. They conducted medical experiments on living persons. Specific Germans did these things—guards, doctors, administrators, train engineers who transported victims, neighbors who informed on hiding families.
After Japanese military personnel attacked Pearl Harbor in December 1941, the U.S. entered the war. President Franklin Roosevelt mobilized factories for war production. Persons holding official positions imprisoned over 120,000 Japanese Americans—two-thirds of them U.S.-born—in concentration camps. They seized these families’ homes and businesses without trial or compensation. No evidence showed these persons threatened anyone. Their crime consisted of having Japanese ancestry.
This war killed approximately 70-85 million persons worldwide—the deadliest conflict in human history. U.S. soldiers waded ashore at Normandy on D-Day, June 6, 1944, thousands dying on the beaches. They fought across France, into Germany. They liberated concentration camps and saw what humans can do to other humans.
In August 1945, President Harry Truman ordered atomic bombs dropped on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The bombs killed over 100,000 persons instantly—mostly civilians. Children walking to school vaporized. Families eating breakfast burned alive. Many more died from radiation in the weeks and years that followed—their hair falling out, their skin peeling, their organs failing.
Truman claimed the bombs saved lives by ending the war quickly. Others argued Japan would have surrendered anyway, and that the bombs deliberately targeted civilians to test new weapons and intimidate Soviet rulers. We cannot know what Truman actually thought. We know what he did: he ordered the deaths of over 100,000 persons, most of them non-combatants.
After the war, U.S. and Soviet rulers divided Europe into spheres of influence. Both groups built nuclear arsenals capable of destroying human civilization. They came close to using them several times. Millions of persons lived for decades knowing that a few persons holding positions in Washington or Moscow could end human existence on a whim.
Throughout U.S. history, persons excluded from influence have organized to demand that other persons stop restricting their actions.
After decades of organizing, women gained the ability to mark ballots in 1920—an ability men had hoarded for themselves. Persons like Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Ida B. Wells had agitated, marched, lobbied, and gone to cages. Some chained themselves to fences. Others refused food and faced tubes forced down their throats. They endured ridicule, violence, and imprisonment—yet they persisted until enough men in official positions agreed to stop blocking them.
In the 1950s and 1960s, Black persons organized to end the Jim Crow system. In Montgomery, Alabama, Rosa Parks refused to give up her bus seat to a white passenger. Police arrested her—persons with weapons caged her for sitting where she wanted to sit. In response, Black residents organized a bus boycott that lasted over a year. They walked miles to work in rain and heat. They carpooled. They persisted until the bus company faced bankruptcy.
Martin Luther King Jr. organized boycotts, marches, and protests. He advocated absorbing violence without retaliating—letting white persons beat Black persons on camera so television audiences could see what segregation actually looked like. Police in Birmingham turned fire hoses and attack dogs on child protesters. The images showed Americans in other regions what their fellow citizens did to children whose skin looked different.
John Lewis led demonstrators across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, demanding the ability to vote without persons blocking them. State troopers beat them with clubs, fracturing Lewis’s skull. He nearly died because he wanted to mark a ballot.
Fannie Lou Hamer, a Mississippi sharecropper, testified before Congress about what happened when she tried to register to vote. Police arrested her. In jail, other prisoners—forced by guards—beat her with clubs until she could barely move. Her crime: wanting to participate in choosing which persons would hold official positions.
“I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired,” she declared.
Congress eventually passed laws in 1964 and 1965 prohibiting certain forms of discrimination and allowing federal officials to intervene when local persons blocked Black persons from voting. But these laws passed only because specific persons pressured specific politicians—through protests, through economic pressure, through putting their bodies on the line and accepting beatings and cages.
Not everyone agreed on tactics. Malcolm X criticized King’s approach, arguing Black persons had the ability to defend themselves and should use it. The Black Panther Party organized armed patrols to monitor police behavior—watching the watchers, documenting when persons with badges beat persons without them.
Later, other groups organized similarly. Persons with disabilities occupied government buildings until persons holding official positions agreed to require accessible public spaces—ramps, elevators, bathrooms that wheelchair users could enter. Before these changes, persons in wheelchairs often could not enter schools, libraries, or government buildings. Other persons had simply ignored their existence when designing spaces.
Persons attracted to their own sex or identifying differently than assigned at birth organized pride marches and lobbied for changes. For decades, police raided bars where such persons gathered, arresting them, publishing their names in newspapers to shame them, costing them jobs and families. In 1969, patrons of the Stonewall Inn in New York fought back against a police raid—throwing bottles, refusing to disperse. This sparked a movement that eventually changed how many persons holding official positions treated them.
Notice: “Progress” did not happen on its own. No force called “history” bent anything toward anything. Specific persons took specific actions, often at great personal cost. And other specific persons resisted every step—often violently, often with the backing of persons in official positions.
You live in a place where approximately 330 million persons reside. These persons hold vastly different amounts of money and influence. Some own private jets and multiple houses. Some sleep under bridges. Some work three jobs and still cannot afford medical care. Some inherit fortunes and never work at all.
Persons currently holding official positions make decisions that affect your life. They choose how much to take from your earnings, what to fund with that money, whom to cage, when to send soldiers to kill persons in other places. They make these choices for various reasons: personal conviction, pressure from wealthy donors who fund their campaigns, fear of losing elections, genuine care for the persons they represent, or plain corruption.
Persons running large corporations—legal fictions that function as “persons” under U.S. law—influence these decisions through lobbying and campaign contributions. These executives often prioritize increasing their own wealth above other considerations. When their companies poison rivers, the executives may pay fines but rarely face cages themselves. The fines often cost less than the profits from the poisoning.
Some persons accumulate so much money that they can shape which information other persons receive. They buy newspapers, television stations, websites. They fund think tanks that produce reports supporting whatever policies benefit them. They donate to universities that then hire professors who teach ideas convenient for the donors.
Temperatures and weather patterns across the planet shift because humans burn fossil fuels that release gases trapping heat. Scientists—specific persons conducting specific research—have documented rising temperatures, melting ice, increasingly severe storms. Persons who run oil companies knew about this for decades. Some of them funded campaigns to spread doubt about the science, paying persons to write articles questioning what their own researchers had confirmed.
What happens next depends on what specific persons do. Including you.
You might feel powerless. You might think: what can one thirteen-year-old do against all this? But remember what you learned in this book. Every large change began with specific persons taking specific actions. The persons who organized against Jim Crow started as individuals refusing to accept their situation. Rosa Parks sat down on a bus. That action, combined with thousands of other actions by thousands of other persons, changed how millions of persons lived.
This does not mean change comes easily. The persons who benefit from current arrangements will resist changes that threaten their position. They have resources—money, media access, connections to persons holding official positions—that most of us lack. Many efforts fail. Many activists burn out or face cages or worse.
But some efforts succeed. And you cannot know in advance which will.
You have now read a history that never lets “America” or “freedom” or “justice” act. Only persons acted. Only persons made decisions. Only persons benefited or suffered.
The big words—nation, liberty, rights, democracy, justice, freedom—describe nothing you can touch. They describe stories that certain persons tell and other persons believe. When someone says “America needs X” or “freedom requires Y,” ask: which specific persons benefit if we do X? Which specific persons want Y, and why?
Some persons will tell you that “human nature” prevents certain changes. That competition and domination arise inevitably from our biology. But human beings have organized themselves in many different ways across history. Some groups emphasized cooperation. Some distributed resources more equally than others. “Human nature” describes nothing fixed—it describes whatever the speaker wants to justify.
Some persons will tell you that “the economy” requires certain policies. That persons must accept low wages or pollution or inequality because “market forces” demand it. But “market forces” describes rules that specific persons wrote and enforce. Different rules would produce different outcomes. “The economy” never made a decision. Persons with power made decisions and called them “economic necessity.”
Some persons will tell you that “history” moves in certain directions. That “progress” happens inevitably. But “history” describes what persons did. Nothing more. The patterns you see in it depend on which events you choose to emphasize and which you ignore. Different persons writing history books emphasize different events—usually events that make their own group look good.
This textbook cannot tell you what choices to make. Only you can decide what you value. Only you can choose what actions to take.
The creative nothing—which means you, in this moment—creates everything from itself. No authority can make your choices for you. Authorities can punish your choices. They can limit your options. But the choosing remains yours.
Now go make something.
This textbook serves you, or it serves no one. The moment you treat it as authority—discard it. Even the person who wrote this book had interests and blind spots. Even this text hides certain things and reveals others.
The grin stretches across every page. The joke plays on everyone who mistakes their preferred abstractions for reality.
Including, perhaps, the person who reads it and thinks they now understand something.
Understanding dissolves too. The only thing that remains: you, here, now, choosing.
Published by Centaurus Press · Universitas Scholarium · All rights reserved.