Fabric of a Nation: A History with Skills and Sources, For the AP

The only AP® U.S. History book that weaves together content, skills, sources, and AP® exam practice is back and better than ever.

AP® U.S. History is about so much more than just events on a timeline. The Course Framework is designed to develop crucial reading, reasoning, and writing skills that help students think like historians to interpret the world of the past—and understand how it relates to the world of today. And Fabric of a Nation is still one of the only textbooks that covers every aspect of this course, seamlessly stitching together history skills, sources, and AP® Exam practice. In this new edition, we make it easier than ever to cover all of the skills and topics in the AP® U.S. History Course and Exam Description by aligning our content to the Unit Topics and Historical Reasoning Processes of each Period.

An Accessible, Balanced Narrative
There’s only so much time in a school year. To cover everything and leave enough time for skill development, you need more focused content, not just more content—and to be most effective, skills development should be accessible and placed just where it is needed. Within the narration are AP® Skills Workshops and AP® Working with Evidence features that support students as they learn the history and prepare to take the AP® Exam. Fabric of a Nation delivers a thorough, yet approachable historical narrative that perfectly aligns with all the essential content of the AP® course. An up-to-date historical survey based on current scholarship, this book is also easy to understand and fun to read, with plenty of interesting details and a crisp writing style that keeps things fresh.

Perfectly Aligned to the AP® Scope and Sequence
Fabric of a Nation has an easy-to-use organization that fully aligns with the College Board’s Course and Exam Description for AP® U.S. History. Instead of long, meandering chapters, this book is divided into smaller, approachable modules that pull together content, skills, sources, and AP® Exam practice into brief 1- to 2-day lessons. Each module corresponds with a specific unit topic in the course framework, including the contextualization and reasoning process topics that bookend each time period. This approach takes the guesswork out of when to introduce which skills and how to blend sources with content—all at a manageable pace that mirrors the scope and sequence of the AP® course framework.

Seamlessly Integrated AP® Skill Workshops for Thinking and Writing Skills
Inspired by the authors’ classroom experience and sound pedagogical principles, the instruction in Fabric of a Nation scaffolds learning throughout the course of the book. Every module offers an opportunity to either learn or practice new skills to prepare for each section of the AP® Exam in an AP® Skills Workshop. As the book progresses, the nature of these workshops moves from focused instruction early on, to guided practice in the middle of the book, and then finally, to independent practice near the end of the year.

Fabric of a Nation was designed to provide you and your students everything needed to succeed in the AP® US History course and on the exam. It’s all there.

AP® Exam Practice: We Boast the Most Material
Every period culminates with AP® Practice questions providing students a mini-AP® exam with approximately 15 stimulus-based multiple-choice questions, 4 short-answer questions, 1 document-based essay question, and 3 long-essay questions.

Additionally, a full-length practice exam is included at the end of the textbook. Because the modules in this book are divided into periods that perfectly align to the AP® U.S. History Course and Exam Description, it’s also easy to pair Fabric of a Nation with the resources on AP® Classroom. Each textbook module can be used with the corresponding AP® Daily Videos and Topic Questions while the AP® Exam Practice at the end of each period can be supplemented with the Personal Progress Checks from AP® Classroom.

JASON STACY is Professor of U.S. History and Social Science Pedagogy at Southern Illinois University–Edwardsville. Before joining the history department at SIU-Edwardsville, Stacy taught AP® U.S. History for eight years at Adlai E. Stevenson High School in Lincolnshire, Illinois. Stacy has served as an AP® U.S. History reader, table leader, exam leader, consultant, senior auditor, and question author for the AP® U.S. History exam. Author and editor of multiple books on authors like Walt Whitman and Edgar Lee Masters, his research has appeared in Social Education, the Walt Whitman Quarterly Review, and American Educational History. Stacy is also a contributing editor for the Walt Whitman Archive, where he edits Whitman’s journalism. Recently, he published Spoon River America: Edgar Lee Masters and the Myth of the American Small Town with the University of Illinois Press. Stacy has served as the president of the Illinois Council for the Social Studies, the editor of The Councilor: A Journal of the Social Studies, and a reviewer for many academic journals and presses.

MATTHEW ELLINGTON has taught AP® U.S. History at Ruben S. Ayala High School in Chino Hills, California, since 1998, where he has also served as an instructional coach, induction mentor for new teachers, social science department chairperson, and a member of his school district’s Teaching and Learning Taskforce. Ellington has been an active AP® U.S. History workshop consultant and exam reader for more than twenty years. He has also served as an AP® Mentor and as a member on the College Board’s Consultant Advisory Panel. Ellington co-authored The Survival Guide for AP® U.S. History and contributed to Teaching Ideas for AP® History: A Video Resource.

Ellington and Stacy have been featured together on C-SPAN’s AP® U.S. History televised annual review sessions since 2020.