Making History

"Starting with early man's cave paintings, through the ages to Harvey Pekar's autobiographical comic book series, American Splendor, and beyond, people have always employed art and pictures to record their personal histories. With Making History, Bruce Olav Solheim melds history, autobiography, and comic art into an entirely unique literary creation.

- Larry Jost, illustrator



Making History offers a marvelous adaptation of texts and images to the worldview and interests of today's college student. The "personal history" enriched so dramatically by Gary Dumm's one-page comic art contributions, hits home where a detached, purely scholarly approach does not and cannot. Bruce Solheim is a uniquely engaged teacher and textbook author, and students will welcome his work as something dear to them as well as useful. - Paul Buhle, retired lecturer, Brown University

Author/editor of numerous histories and non-fiction comic art volumes
It's time to take history personally. This unique text takes a personal approach to American history to get readers excited about their own roles in making history and empower them to make changes for the betterment of their country.
This text is inspiring, consciousness raising, thought provoking, compelling, and a pleasure to read. Making History vividly captures the last 125 years of our U.S. history and does not gloss over or slant the content of our past, but presents fairly both the good and the bad.

- William V. Wenger, Colonel, USA (retired), business executive, college professor, actor


Making History: A Personal Approach to Modern American History begins with the important point that while most standard textbooks refer to events that have shaped America, these events didn't happen to America - they happened to individual Americans. It is individuals who give their lives in armed conflicts and lose their homes during financial downturns.



With this perspective in mind, students are prepared to read and think differently about post-Civil War history, including industrialization, the Spanish-American War and World Wars, the Depression, the Cold War, the Civil Rights Era, Vietnam, the rise of modern conservatism, and the country's current state of decline. This edition features a new chapter on reconstruction and an assessment of the Obama presidency and the 2016 presidential election. The first history textbook to include comic book pages, Making History features artwork by comic book artist Gary Dumm of American Splendor.



With its non-traditional take on events and their impacts, Making History is a fresh alternative for survey courses in American history and historiography or classes in American civilization or popular culture.
Dr. Bruce Olav Solheim has written five books and seven plays, and is a distinguished professor of history at Citrus College in Glendora, California. Dr. Solheim founded the Veterans Program at Citrus College and cofounded the Boots to Books transition course, which is the first college course aimed at returning veterans. He served for six years in the United States Army as a jail guard and helicopter pilot. Dr. Solheim earned his doctorate in history at Bowling Green State University and served as a Fulbright professor at the University of Tromsø in northern Norway.