Perhaps your introduction to American history through high school was like mine: the discovery by white people from Europe of a vast land to be their own continental manifest destiny (once the current inhabitants were edged out); yes, there was slavery for a while, but it was ended a long time ago by a civil war in which both sides were gallant; nothing much past the First World War; in short, a glorious progression of triumphs with any embarrassing details smudged out, a pious propaganda.
In four and a half years of retirement I have indulged myself in reading books about American history with a little more gristle, which I can recommend to you.
Jill Lepore, We the People: Most of what we read about the U.S. Constitution concerns the white men who wrote it and the white men who subsequently amended or ruled on it. Lepore's history of the Constitution focuses on the people--Blacks, Indians, women, more--who were not originally included in the People. She recounts a multitude of attempts, most of them unsuccessful, to amend the national document. And she explores the curious circumstance that successful amendments tend to come in spurts after some social upheaval.
Nicole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project: You need not subscribe to every argument in these essays to realize that the neglect of attention to the role of Black people in their four centuries here badly requires correction. In tandem, Isabel Wilkerson's The Warmth of Other Suns recounts the movement of Black people from the South to the North in the decades following the Civil War, with significant impact on both regions.
Timothy Egan, A Fever in the Heartland: In the 1920s the Ku Klux Klan held enormous sway in U.S. politics, particularly in the Middle West and West, where, led by a charlatan named D.C. Stephenson, it controlled state legislatures and public offices in its campaign against Blacks, Jews, Roman Catholics, and immigrants. The scandal that brought down Stephenson, a woman's deathbed testimony of his cruelties, also brought down the Klan.
Daniel Okrent, The Guarded Gate: Bigotry, Eugenics, and the Law That Kept Two Generations of Jews, Italians, and Other European Immigrants Out of America: A century ago the country was in a ferment about the flood of immigrants overwhelming our native [white, Protestant] culture. Since then many Italians and Eastern Europeans have achieved white status, at least on an honorary basis, as the Irish did decades before. But we are still up in alarm about how Those People, whose identities shift with the generations, threaten us.
Rick Perlstein, Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus: The ideas that Barry Goldwater espoused in his unsuccessful presidential campaign in 1964 later flowered and prospered in ways he could not have foreseen. He was a true conservative, suspicious of the fundraising and mass marketing techniques that supporters urged on him, but those supporters learned in 1964 what they could make work, and we live with the consequences.
And for fun, a few more:
Stacy Schiff, The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams and A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America: Indispensable for an understanding of how our unlikely revolution against Britain succeeded.
Joel Richard Paul: Indivisible: Daniel Webster and the Birth of American Nationalism: Webster's oratory awoke the nation to the idea that the Constitution was not simply a compact of states, a loosely linked collection of varying regional identities, but an expression of an entire people.
Erik Larson: Demon of Unrest: An account of the turmoil in the months between Abraham Lincoln's election to the presidency and the outbreak of the Civil War at Fort Sumter.
Joseph J. Ellis, American Dialogue: The Founders and Us: Ellis discusses the issues that trouble us today within the context of how the ideas of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and John Adams might inform us.
Jess McHugh, Americanon: The popular books that shaped American identity. You know, The Old Farmer's Almanac, McGuffey readers, Dale Carnegie ...
Kevin Kruse and Julian E. Zeliger, Myth America: You'll recall Will Rogers saying something to the effect that "it ain't the thing you don't know that hurts you, it's the thing you know that ain't so." Kruze and Zeliger assembled a team of historians to describe things that we were all taught that are not quite so.
Ben Yagoda, Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition: The Temperance people, the Mob, and the millionaires who pressed for Repeal hoping that duties from the sale of liquor would lead to the end of the income tax.
Feel free to suggest.
