Several years ago, the author had the opportunity to instruct the early U.S. survey course for the first time. While preparing the author spent a good amount of time thinking on the relationship between academic and popular history, and subsequently testing insights within a variety of classroom lessons and activities. Since then, the author has spent several years compiling ideas and practices into a new kind of U.S. survey class, one that abandons the traditional class structure and places popular history at the course's core. In this article the author wants to flesh out this relationship between popular and academic history, pointing out some of the fundamental disconnects between these two practices and showing how they underlie many of the perennial problems historians face as educators in the classroom. Next, the author will show how he addressed these problems within his early American history survey, adopting a course that eschews facts by making the problematic relationship between academic and popular history the primary target of class inquiry. Structured this way, the survey becomes less about introducing students to a canon of essential American events, and more about demonstrating how history operates on the ground within our twenty-first-century environment.