Building Democracy for All Interactive Explorations of Government and Civic Life (Maloy and Trust)

Building Democracy for All is an interactive, multimodal, multicultural, open access e-book for teaching and learning key topics in United States Government and Civic Life. It focuses on the importance of community engagement and social responsibility among middle and high school students—core themes in the Massachusetts 8th Grade History & Social Science Curriculum Framework.

Welcome to Building Democracy for All – an interactive, multimodal, multicultural, open-access eBook for teaching and learning key topics in United States Government and Civic Life. Open access means these materials are “digital, online, and free of charge” (Billings, 2019). This book is available online to anyone with an internet connection. The eBook can also be viewed and printed as a PDF file.

Building Democracy for All has been developed by a collaborative writing team of higher education faculty, public school teachers, educational librarians, and college students who are preparing to become history and social studies teachers. The primary editors and curators are from the University of Massachusetts Amherst College of Education. Contributing teachers come from school districts in the Connecticut River valley region of western Massachusetts (Amherst, Gateway, Westfield, Hampshire Regional, and Springfield). As an open resource, the book is being revised constantly by the members of the writing team to ensure timely inclusion of online resources and information.

eBook Overview

We began writing this book in summer 2019 and are continuing through 2021 within the context of what Joe Biden, in his 2021 presidential inaugural address, called the “cascading crises of our era,” including the COVID-19 pandemic, accelerating climate change, widespread economic inequality, long-denied demands for racial justice, America’s shifting position in the world, and Trumpism and its attacks on democracy and the rule of law. The challenging impacts of these six crises on our government and our lives are present in every chapter.

This book has emerged as well from the intense current political divisions over what should be the role of government in people’s lives and communities. On one side, emerging on a wide scale during the 1980s and now accentuated by the Trump Presidency, is an aggressive embrace of individualism by the Republican Party and conservative media outlets like Fox News. Individualism favors cutting taxes, dismantling government regulations, opposing labor unions, and cutting back social safety networks for lowincome people. It favors allowing businesses and corporations to operate as they wish without protections for consumers or workers. This commitment to individualism is seen in opposition to vaccinations, mask mandates, online schooling, and other actions by federal, state, and local governments to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic.