Are you ready to learn American government?
Get ready to learn about American government as only Guest Hollow can do it in this absolutely FREE textbook! Why are we offering this as free textbook? Have a look at our About Us page, and you’ll get a sense of who we are and why we care about homeschoolers like we do.
Having said that, please consider using Guest Hollow, LLC as your source for other curriculums and materials. Despite being a tiny mom-and-pop company, Guest Hollow LLC has a lot to offer, and it’s growing all the time.
Please explore our site as well as our social media presence and let us know what you think!
This FREE book is designed to be used with Guest Hollow’s Government, Economics, and Personal Finance Curriculum, but anyone is free to use it. ***IMPORTANT*** This book is but one of MANY books called for in the curriculum. It is not in and of itself enough to teach this subject. It should be used with the curriculum. It is NOT a curriculum on its own and should not be thought of as such.
Reading tip: When reading the online textbook, don’t forget that most browsers will allow you to increase the font size of the page you are reading (if that’s something you need) to make the reading more comfortable. 🙂
Video tip: You can change the speed of YouTube videos. You can click settings on the YouTube video player and pick a faster playback speed up to 2x the speed. I watched a lot of the longer informational videos at this speed with no loss in understanding or retention. You may want to try it as well if you are short on time and if you can process the audio at a faster speed. 😉 Similarly, you can slow down the speed if it is hard to catch a word or phrase.
Chapters
- Chapter 1: American Government and Civic Engagement
- Chapter 2: The Constitution and Its Origins
- Chapter 3: American Federalism
- Chapter 4: Civil Liberties
- Chapter 5: Civil Rights
- Chapter 6: The Politics of Public Opinion
- Chapter 7: Voting and Elections
- Chapter 8: The Media
- Chapter 9: Political Parties
- Chapter 10: Interest Groups and Lobbying
- Chapter 11: Congress
- Chapter 12: The Presidency
- Chapter 13: The Courts
- Chapter 14: State and Local Government
- Chapter 15: The Bureaucracy
- Chapter 16: Domestic Policy
- Chapter 17: Foreign Policy
Documents
- Magna Carta
- Mayflower Compact
- Federalist Papers #10 and #51
- Declaration of Independence
- Articles of Confederation
- The Constitution of the United States
- Electoral College Votes by State, 2012–2020
- Selected Supreme Court Cases
We’ve taken excerpts from the below-mentioned resources and heavily edited and added to them for our intended audience.
This text was adapted (with permission) from: American Government – 3e
Original authors/editors:
Glen Krutz, Professor of Political Science and Associate Director, Carl Albert Congressional Research and Studies Center at the University of Oklahoma. Krutz joined the Department of Political Science in 2002. Before joining OU, he served on the faculty of Arizona State University and helped run two large-scale National Science Foundation projects as a doctoral student at Texas A&M University.
Prosper Bernard, Jr., City University of New York
Jennifer Danley-Scott, Texas Woman’s University
Ann Kordas, Johnson & Wales University
Christopher Lawrence, Middle Georgia State College
Tonya Neaves, George Mason University
Adam Newmark, Appalachian State University
Brooks D. Simpson, Arizona State University
Joel Webb, Tulane University
Abram Trosky, US Army War College
Shawn Williams, Campbellsville University
Rhonda Wrzenski, Indiana University Southeast
Original Editor: Sylvie Waskiewicz, PhD, is an editor, researcher, and writer who specialties include textbook publishing and e-learning instructional design, including copyediting and proofreading with meticulous review of text, layout, and media from first pages to printer proofs as well as QC of web content (HTML/XML).
This online book is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.
Information was also taken from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License and other resources (listed in the individual page credits).
Beowulf the Fox Terrier dog and the Greek & Latin roots graphic © Guest Hollow, LLC
What grade is to this for
This book is meant for use with Guest Hollow’s Government, Economics and Personal Finance curriculum:
https://guesthollow.com/store/guest-hollows-government-economics-and-personal-finance-curriculum/
Grade Level / Age
Guest Hollow’s Government, Economics, and Personal Finance Curriculum is suggested for:
● Grades 9-12
● Approximate ages
13-18
Is there a way to have a printed version of this book?
Thank you for writing to us and asking about printing the Guest Hollow Government Textbook. The short answer is that the Guest Hollow edited textbook for this curriculum is not easily printable and there is no printable or downloadable version available from Guest Hollow.
The reason for this is because the textbook was designed to be an electronic-format online-only asset. There is so much woven into the textbook, from links that are hard coded to videos and other items that are embedded into it electronically, we feel that you would lose a great deal of the functionality and efficaciousness of the book by rendering it into a hardcopy item.
When combined with the very rich overlay of a plethora of other links, videos, activities, the schedule, and of course much more in the curriculum, this makes for a very rich and robust package that you just cannot beat.
It is possible that a customer could print the textbook by saving the pages one at a time from the html pages into PDFs and then printing those but that would be very cumbersome and would likely lead to loss of content because of the above described embedded or linked items.
The link for “9.1 What Are Parties and How Did They Form?” goes to the top of chapter 9, instead of the 9.1 heading.
Thank you!!! It’s fixed now! 🙂