Teaching U.S. History with eBooks and Electives by Jim McCabe

The epub format below is for your Apple and Android devices including the Send-to-Kindle feature in Amazon.

Download  the mobi file for Amazon devices except the Send to Kindle feature  here.

This is a guidebook to ninety free eBooks, primarily about American history, from three non-profits: Project Gutenberg, StandardeBooks, and this site. The idea is that skimming the guidebook will be more efficient than opening and skimming each eBook on this site. I selected  books which I think will be huge improvements on the World History and American textbooks used in many classrooms. I promise that each book in this collection is more dramatic than an textbook in my collection of textbooks. In addition to my search for drama, I tried to find books at a variety of reading levels so that weak readers would have materials to read.

As I wrote the descriptions of the books,  I often included suggestions for related writing assignments. Writing in high school matters a great deal in my opinion. The failure rates in writing classes at the community college where I taught were painful and could have been avoided with more practice at the high school level.

I found that requiring references to the reading in each writing assignment coerced students into doing more of the reading. I also found that including space for students’ voices in each writing assignment led to more energetic essays, but I digress.

Please send your comments, corrections, and suggestions for digitizing other out of print books to me at feedback@ebooksforstudents.org.

Regards,
Jim McCabe