Meticulously Aligned to the REDESIGNED AP® U.S. Government and Politics Course
From the Big Ideas to the Essential Knowledge statements, this book has been painstakingly aligned to the concepts of the course. Each book unit corresponds to the same unit in the course framework. We’ve kept the coverage brief and targeted to make the book and thus the course more manageable for you and your students.

Simple Modular Organization
Pacing your AP® U.S. Government and Politics Course can be very challenging with so many concepts and skills to teach, usually in only a single semester. To help, we have segmented chapters into 78 sections guided by learning targets. Each section serves as a discrete instructional module—just enough for a single day’s lesson to deliver content, skills, assignments, and assessments in a brief easy-to-use “chunk.” Whether you are a novice or veteran teacher, these modules will save you hours of planning time.

Integrated AP® Political Science Practices Features
Each chapter includes 2-3 special features to enhance students’ mastery of the course’s Political Science Practices and Reasoning Processes.–Each includes instruction, modeling, and practice in the AP® style.

Integrated Public Policy Coverage
Most traditional books relegate public policy to discrete, separate chapters, but the new AP® course integrates policy throughout. As you might expect from a book created for the new course, American Government: Stories of a Nation for the AP® Course incorporates public policy.  This approach emphasizes how public policy functions as the application of principles taught in each chapter and how public policies actually are implemented.

Integrated AP® Exam Practice
At the end of every section, chapter, and unit, you will find AP®-style practice items—multiple choice questions, free response questions, and argumentation questions—that conform to the rewritten AP® exam. These questions were written and vetted by AP® teachers deeply familiar with the format of the new exam.

Meaningful, Focused Work on the Required Court Cases
The College Board chose fifteen required U.S. Supreme Court cases to highlight the role of the U.S. Supreme Court in interpreting the Constitution and Bill of Rights. In American Government: Stories of a Nation for the AP® Course , chapters that align with particular cases introduce a deep reading of the case, point out the importance of the case to the AP® course, and assess students’ knowledge. Argumentation questions introduce pertinent cases and ask students to articulate a thesis, use the cases as evidence, and write an essay.

Deeper Understanding of the Foundational Documents
The revised course focuses on foundational documents like the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution. This book leads students carefully through those foundational documents, quoting them extensively, and summarizing their arguments. In addition to multiple-choice and free-response practice, your students will also learn how to use the foundational documents as evidence in the model argumentation questions where they get practice writing an essay in the style of the revised AP® Exam. 

A supplemental document reader containing required foundational documents and court cases is also available.

Critical Thinking Assignments to Extend Learning
To add some fun and interesting ideas for taking your class beyond the exam, this book includes Critical Thinking Assignments at the end of each chapter and unit to prompt students to engage with the course concepts in novel and creative ways.

Engaging Narratives That Bring Abstract Concepts to Life
American Government: Stories of a Nation for the AP® Course puts an emphasis on practical applications by framing each chapter with a story from the real world showing how the principles of government have real effects that impact real people. For example, to understand political participation and political formation, we follow the story of an AP® U.S. Government student in Colorado who volunteered for a Republican congressional campaign and became increasingly involved in electoral politics.

Complete Package to Support Your Instruction
This book comes with a wrap-around Teacher’s Edition, written by veteran AP® teachers and College Board® consultants, who know the course and know the students.

The Teacher’s Resource Materials include everything you need to support your teaching and your students’ learning.  From handouts to lesson plans, you’ll find it all in the TRM (available as a flash drive, or as resources in the e-book).

American Government: Stories of a Nation for the AP® Course is available in a range of e-book platforms, including our fully interactive LaunchPad e-book. In LaunchPad, every question in the book is assignable. This means that students can respond directly in the e-book and have their work report to your gradebook. It includes integrated Teacher’s Resource Materials and LearningCurve adaptive quizzing, and it works on any device. To find the e-book that’s right for you, contact your Bedford, Freeman & Worth sales representative.

Our LearningCurve adaptive quizzing engine will guide students to mastery of the course content. This first-ever LearningCurve for AP® U.S. Government is specifically designed to build understanding of the revised AP® course concepts.

The ExamView® Assessment Suite includes more than a thousand AP®-style multiple choice, free-response, and argumentation questions to help students prepare for the AP® Exam. The ExamView Test Generator lets you quickly create paper, Internet, and LAN-based tests. Tests can be created in minutes, and the platform is fully customizable, allowing you to enter your own questions, edit existing questions, set time limits, and incorporate multimedia. To discourage plagiarism and cheating, the test bank can scramble answers and change the order of questions. Detailed results reports feed into a gradebook.

The Foundational Documents and Court Cases Reader includes all of the documents and cases required by the College Board®, as well as some frequently taught works that go beyond the course framework. Each document is accompanied by commentary and guided questions, to help students understand these complex texts.