This collection is an introduction to both American history and to the Core Documents project of Teaching American History. As an introduction to American history, it focuses on several key themes or ideas that have shaped our history, including equality and liberty, race and civil rights, religion and politics, America’s uniqueness and place in the world, the relationship between the states and the federal government, and the federal government and the daily lives of Americans. (Thematic Table of Contents, lists the documents according to theme.) It presents these themes and ideas as Americans thought about them when the United States was an agrarian republic, as it developed into an industrialized nation-state, and as it most recently struggled with the consequences of its success in creating a globalized economy and liberal international order that, to a remarkable degree, reflects the guiding principles of its own continental expansion (See The Northwest Ordinance). Those guiding principles were, in turn, formed from the central principle of all American history and politics—human equality—as expressed in the Declaration of Independence. The Declaration is not placed among the fifty core documents in this collection for the simple reason that listing it as one among many documents does not do it justice. It, or rather the self-evident truth it enshrined—“all men are created equal”—is the transcendent cause of all the other documents in the collection. It appears in an appendix, as does the Constitution, not as an afterthought but as a sign of its singular importance. The opening words of the Constitution, “We the people,” derive their status from the Declaration. If Americans had not believed in equality, then the opening of the Constitution might have been written “We the white people,” or “We the rich,” or “We the poor,” or “We the people of British descent,” or “We the Protestant people.” It is true, of course, that some Americans have tried from time to time to read the opening of the Constitution in such partial ways, but the original plain and profound declaration of human equality has so far defied such readings and prevented them from gaining final authority. Paradoxically, perhaps, as the documents in this collection show, no idea in American history has been so hard for Americans to understand or has caused them so much trouble as the self-evident truth of human equality. Documents other than those in this collection might have been chosen with equal justification to illuminate its themes. That does not diminish the importance of those that were chosen, however. It merely testifies to the rich supply of documents we may choose from. We have omitted documents dealing with foreign policy because that is rightfully subordinate to the issues the selected documents deal with. Including a few documents on foreign affairs seemed unnecessary since the Core Documents collection currently includes American Foreign Policy to 1899 and The Cold War, and will include American Foreign Policy since 1899. As an introduction to the Core Documents Collection, this volume uses documents and editorial material taken from other volumes (see the note at the end of this introduction). As do the other volumes in the collection, this volume provides a general introduction and introductions to each document to provide historical context. Each document has been checked against an authoritative source to ensure accuracy and has been annotated to identify people, events, movements, or ideas that may be unfamiliar. In addition to the thematic table of contents already mentioned, every volume contains in an appendix one set of study questions on the document and another that refers to other documents in the collection, tying them together as the thematic table of contents does. Finally, all the volumes in the collection include an appendix with suggested further reading. When completed, the Teaching American History documents collection will be a comprehensive and authoritative account of America’s story, told in the words of those who wrote it—America’s presidents, labor leaders, farmers, philosophers, industrialists, politicians, workers, explorers, religious leaders, judges, soldiers; its slaveholders and abolitionists; its expansionists and isolationists; its reformers and stand-patters; its strict and broad constructionists; its hard-eyed realists and visionary utopians—all united in their commitment to equality and liberty, yet all also divided often by their different understandings of these most fundamental American ideas. The documents are about all this—the still unfinished American experiment with self-government.