As we celebrate the semiquincentennial of the United States, here's a general list of books that I've read in the past few years that cover the span of American history. Some I enjoyed more than others, but one of more of them might be of interest to you.
American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America. Colin Woodard. Viking, 2011. 384 pages. (10 year anniversary updated edition 2021)
This is one of those books that make you think about American history in a different way than what you're used to. It's not a new idea, but relatively new to me. Colin Woodard's approach is to tell the story of America as a loose federation of eleven separate and distinct nations, each with its own very distinct roots, attitudes, and beliefs. Those distinctions continue to shape us, our society, and all political discourse and outcomes today. Basically, according to this view, America has only been a unified country during World War II, and even then each nation came to its support of the war effort with different motivations. The rest of the time, the nations have been making and breaking alliances with each other and in conflict with each other. In fact, our country's founding and the principles on which it was founded were not universally supported. The six nations were at odds with each other throughout. It all makes for an extremely interesting theory that makes sense in a lot of ways, and, in fact, some of the author's impressions in the original 2011 publication have proven to be somewhat prescient. It's not necessarily an optimistic picture, but it makes you think.
History Nation: A Citizen's Guide to the History of the United States. David Hanna. Morris & Essex Books, 2024. 357 pages.
David Hanna has written an excellent and concise overview/review of American history, just in time for America's semiquincentennial, and I'm extremely jealous. Hanna is a high school history teacher and author, and he's basically written up his class curriculum. It feels like his curriculum and mine were very similar. Here, he's told America's story, albeit in broad strokes, the good, the bad, and the ugly, using the "city on a hill" theme as bookends, from John Winthrop's use of the phrase in 1630's "A Model of Christian Charity" to Ronald Reagan's invocation of the phrase throughout his political career. He connects events and ideas across time and makes them incredibly accessible. It is a progressive and inclusive historical summary, but it's much more balanced and objective than Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States, a book that some reviewers have compared it to. If you're interested in celebrating "America250" with a solid review that will encourage thinking about America's story and how it should be studied and taught, this is a great book for you.
Democracy: A Case Study. David A. Moss. Belknap Press, 2019. 784 pages.
David A. Moss is a business administration professor at Harvard, and a proponent of the Harvard Business School Case Study Method of classroom discussion. He designed a course in which he applied those principles to the study of history and began training secondary and college history teachers to use it in their classrooms. The idea is to begin with an objective summary of a case and break it down in an open student-led discussion of 5 questions: 1. Define the problem, 2. What is the context?, 3. What key facts must be considered?, 4. What alternatives are available to decision makers?, 5. Finally, as the decision makers at the time of the case, what action should we take? In this book, Moss has selected 19 cases that represent challenges to democracy in American history, some you're familiar with and some you're not. The case is left open-ended to allow contemplation or discussion, but the outcome of each event is discussed in an appendix. The whole point of this book is to encourage discussion. As we are becoming more and more anxious about the state of our country and the rising divisions and tensions that threaten us and our ideals and discourage constructive debate, discussion of these cases in classrooms, book clubs, friends groups, etc. is a powerful antidote. I'm engaged with it as part of a lifelong learning class, and I thoroughly enjoy the thoughtful and respectful discussion of history and politics that I haven't been able to enjoy for twenty years or more. The structure of the book allows a facilitator to pick a few of the cases to study as a group (My group is only doing 4 cases together. The facilitator does the classes at other times with other groups and picks other cases.), but be sure to include Moss' introduction and conclusion as well, because they contain great insights. This is another fantastic book for America's semiquincentennial, and I highly suggest it as a group read.
Overstated: A Coast-to-Coast Roast of the 50 States. Colin Quinn. St. Martin's Press, 2020. 256 pages.
I stumbled onto this book. I like Colin Quinn, and I liked I liked his book The Coloring Book, It was a quick listen, obviously a project to keep him occupied during the pandemic. It is, as promised, a very mild roast of the fifty states, celebrating the quirks and differences that make each state unique. There are amusing bits and interesting bits. While there are occasional historical flubs, he is not a historian and is not writing history, but the reader can see that Quinn does have an appreciation for history. Try it out if you like Quinn as a stand-up.
The Year of Living Constitutionally: One Man's Humble Quest to Follow the Constitution's Original Meaning. A. J. Jacobs. Crown, 2024. 304 pages.
I saw a story about this book on "CBS Sunday Morning" a few weeks ago and thought it sounded interesting. I regretted my purchase before I was finished with the author's introduction. Strike one: the author decided to illustrate the second amendment by walking around New York City carrying a musket and bayonet everywhere. Nobody did that in 1787. Reeks of narcissistic, agenda-driven stunt. Strike two: Maybe it was meant to be a joke, but he wrote that his children invoke the first amendment every time they call him names. Even joking about that (calling a parent names) is unfathomable to me. If it's a joke, not funny; if not, it's so far removed from my experience to make it too weird. (Yes, I am very old-fashioned in some ways.) Strike three: In a couple of paragraphs, he goes on and on about what he describes as the shockingly brutal and horrific language used in the Constitution. If you're triggered by words in an historic document, maybe you should stay away from history. I bailed on this book in the first chapter, not worth my time.
A Is For American: Letters and Other Characters is the Newly United States. Jill Lepore. Knopf, 2002. 256 pages.
The concept of nationalism is rather recent in human history. The question of what makes a nation, what holds a group of people of together as a people, is still studied, discussed, and debated. All too often, the debate turns into violence and bloodshed.
In A Is For American, historian Jill Lepore looks at one element of culture, language, and its role in nationbuilding, specifically how a select group of individuals in the Early Republic period of the United States sought to use language as a tool for shaping the nation, or the world, to meet their vision. Noah Webster and Samuel Morse both wanted to create a uniquely American language to set the United States apart. Both were anti-Catholic and anti-immigrant and saw outside forces poised to destroy their country. Webster believed that an American language and spelling system would force immigrants to assimilate quicker. Morse may have been driven to develop his Morse Code as a secret weapon to ward off the international invasion led by the Pope that he feared. Sequoyah developed a new alphabet to protect and preserve his nation, too, but his nation was the Cherokee,
William Thornton dreamed bigger. He promoted the use of universal alphabet to bring the whole world together in harmony. Thomas Gallaudet and Alexander Graham Bell devoted their lives to improving the lives of the deaf, and they developed new languages to that end. In a more personal story on a smaller scale, Abd al-Rahman Ibrahima, an aging enslaved Muslim man in Mississippi successfully used his Arabic writing ability to free himself.
Jill Lepore has become one of my favorite historians to read, and she's written so much, on so many different topics. This was a very interesting look at language and nationalism.
Who's Your Founding Father? One Man's Quest to Uncover the First True Declaration of Independence. David Fleming. Hachette Books, 2023. 320 pages.
Wow! Never, ever have I thought that I would enjoy a book written by a sports guy, an ESPN guy no less. David Fleming has proven me wrong. This book is up there with Shakespeare Was A Woman as one of my favorite reads of 2023. Like that book, Who's Your Founding Father? takes an iconoclastic swing at a cherished and honored institution and totally backs it up. As a teacher, I loved challenging students' long held misconceptions and "elementary school teacher lies."
The challenged institution here is Thomas Jefferson's Declaration of Independence. No, not the truth that we should be celebrating July 2nd instead of July 4th (as John Adams felt). Whaaattttt?! Yes, the D of I was approved on July 2. The signers took the next two months to sign it, and some of the men who voted for it never signed it, and some of the signers never voted for it. July 4th is just considered the day that it was made public. The question here is, was there an earlier Declaration of Independence that Jefferson plagiarized? Fleming presents a solid case that there was.
This is something that Americans don't know, and, in fact, various people have actively engaged in suppression and destruction of evidence over the last two hundred years in order to protect Jefferson's reputation. Oh, how the mighty have fallen! Jefferson once existed at the summit of the American pantheon: thinker, architect, author, statesman. Today, his rampant hypocrisy and petty nature have chipped away at his reputation. He railed against the evils of slavery, but his whole life and fortune were made possible by slavery. He preached against race-mixing and how it would destroy society, but he had a decades-long relationship with the enslaved Sally Hemings, his dead wife's half-sister. Even during his lifetime, however, he was frequently attacked. Critics called his architecture style imitative and derivative. Fellow Congressmen remembered him as being dull, uninterested, and uninvolved, contributing nothing to Congressional debates and discussions. During the Revolution, he was accused of cowardice while other founders bravely served.
So, what did he plagiarize? On May 20, 1775, a group of 27 Scots-Irish Presbyterian leaders met at the county courthouse in Charlotte North Carolina to draft a declaration of independence from Great Britain, severing all ties. The document was then sent to Philadelphia where the congressmen assembled replied that it was too early and ignored it. Or did they? Whole passages appear verbatim in Jefferson's D of I. Unfortunately, fire destroyed some of the evidence of the Mecklenburg D of I in 1800, and, despite overwhelming credible evidence of its existence, it has been intentionally erased from history, except in North Carolina. John Adams was even unaware until about 1819 when he questioned Jefferson in letters and wrote about it to others. Jefferson, of course, deflected or ignored the questions, but he did say that he was always tasked with "synthesizing" and "harmonizing" numerous inspirations and never tasked with writing an "original" document.
Who's solid evidence should thoroughly convince the reader of the truth about the "Meck Deck," and it is an incredibly fun and entertaining book as well.
Americanon: An Unexpected U.S. History In Thirteen Bestselling Books by Jess McHugh examines 13 bestselling American nonfiction books and their history and legacy. The books include the Old Farmer's Almanac, Noah Webster's Dictionary and Spellers, Emily Post's Etiquette, How to Win Friends and Influence People, The McGuffey Readers, Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography, Betty Crocker's Picture Cookbook, and Everything You Always Wanted Know About Sex. They each had a major impact on American culture when they were first published, and many are still printed, updated, and selling copies today. Each one has sold more copies over the years than the best selling novels in American history. (And many of them pass through multiple hands, especially Webster's and McGuffey's schoolbooks, exponentially increasing their reach and readership.) McHugh calls them "how-to" books because they were all designed to solve a problem or problems that the authors saw in their America, and each one had a very definite agenda, to improve American society. She has created a list of books that are truly part of the American canon, books that reflected and molded an American identity, still impacting us today.
The Nation That Never Was: Reconstructing America's Story. Kermit Roosevelt III. University of Chicago Press, 2022, 256 pages.
If you are interested in reading a thoughtful and thought-provoking take on the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution and the true character of the United States, The Nation That Never Was may be a book for you. It is challenging, but not in a difficult-to read, legal-ese, constitutional-theorists-having-a-scotch-in-a-wood-paneled-library-esoteric-debate kind of way. It challenges what Americans have been taught and think they know about the founding of America and its two most important founding documents, and it challenges our ideas about American ideals, but it's written in very accessible language.
Kermit Roosevelt III is an American author, lawyer, constitutional scholar, and a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania. He is a great-great-grandson of United States President Theodore Roosevelt and a distant cousin of President Franklin D. Roosevelt.
From the beginning, Roosevelt describes the American dilemma: Do we acknowledge and address the shortcomings of America's history and move forward together from there? Or do we continue perpetuating the "standard" story of the founding, created as part of the effort to build a nation but not truthful and accurate, and simply erase the negative elements? In the book, he thoroughly examines the "standard" simplistic and sentimentalized story we've all learned (and taught) and breaks it down, pointing out exaggerations, truths, and untruths. Then he lays out a new way of looking at America's story. That new story is that we should define our national identity around the promises, challenges, and aspirations (some still unachieved) of Reconstruction instead of the founding period. Like Reconstruction historian Eric Foner, he lays out the case for 1865, rather than 1776 or 1619, as modern America's starting point. However, he also distinguishes and separates his argument from those, like Foner, who have called Reconstruction "the Second Founding."
I don't agree with everything Roosevelt wrote, but it was definitely worth reading and thinking about.
Publisher's blurb: "In the most ambitious one volume American history in decades, award winning historian and New Yorker writer Jill Lepore offers a magisterial account of the origins and rise of a divided nation, an urgently needed reckoning with the beauty and tragedy of American history.
Written in elegiac prose, Lepore’s groundbreaking investigation places truth itself―a devotion to facts, proof, and evidence―at the center of the nation’s history. The American experiment rests on three ideas―"these truths," Jefferson called them―political equality, natural rights, and the sovereignty of the people. And it rests, too, on a fearless dedication to inquiry, Lepore argues, because self government depends on it. But has the nation, and democracy itself, delivered on that promise?
These Truths tells this uniquely American story, beginning in 1492, asking whether the course of events over more than five centuries has proven the nation’s truths, or belied them. To answer that question, Lepore traces the intertwined histories of American politics, law, journalism, and technology, from the colonial town meeting to the nineteenth century party machine, from talk radio to twenty first century Internet polls, from Magna Carta to the Patriot Act, from the printing press to Facebook News.
Along the way, Lepore’s sovereign chronicle is filled with arresting sketches of both well known and lesser known Americans, from a parade of presidents and a rogues’ gallery of political mischief makers to the intrepid leaders of protest movements, including Frederick Douglass, the famed abolitionist orator; William Jennings Bryan, the three time presidential candidate and ultimately tragic populist; Pauli Murray, the visionary civil rights strategist; and Phyllis Schlafly, the uncredited architect of modern conservatism.
Americans are descended from slaves and slave owners, from conquerors and the conquered, from immigrants and from people who have fought to end immigration. "A nation born in contradiction will fight forever over the meaning of its history," Lepore writes, but engaging in that struggle by studying the past is part of the work of citizenship. "The past is an inheritance, a gift and a burden," These Truths observes. "It can’t be shirked. There’s nothing for it but to get to know it." "
