I go by the title AmericanStudier in my public scholarship and take that name very seriously. I believe nothing is more important for our future than better remembering our past and that pushing the nation toward its most inspiring ideals requires grappling with our hardest and most painful histories. On my AmericanStudies blog, in my Saturday Evening Post Considering History column, and in all my other scholarly, public, and social media content, I am committed to sharing our histories and stories, figures and works, voices, and writing in all forms and for all audiences. I hope you’ll join me in this work by reading and sharing these great books!
I wrote...
Of Thee I Sing: The Contested History of American Patriotism
My favorite American novel is at once the most righteously angry and the most beautifully optimistic book I’ve ever read.
Historical fiction urgently responding to the present, an intimate family saga that creates an entire community—Chesnutt’s masterpiece is a book I’ve taught almost every year of my career, and I find something new in it each time I read it.
No book reminds me more potently of the worst of our history, and no book inspires me to fight for our best more passionately.
Based on a historically accurate account of the Wilmington, North Carolina, "race riot" of 1898, African-American author Charles W. Chesnutt's innovative novel is a passionate portrait of the betrayal of black culture in America.
For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning…
A Filipino immigrant to the U.S. when he was just a teenager, a migrant laborer who experienced the depths of the Great Depression, and a self-taught creative writer, Carlos Bulosan exemplifies the limits and possibilities of the American Dream.
I love his autobiographical debut novel because its prose is both grittily realistic yet lyrically stunning because it opens up so many specific places and stories from 1930s America yet speaks to universal emotions and ideals, and because it ends with the single most inspiring vision of our nation that I’ve ever found.
America Is in the Heart is a semi-autobiographical novel from the celebrated author Carlos Bulosan. Beginning with the young Carlos' difficult childhood in the rural Philippines where he and his family face immense hardship, this gripping story follows the narrator's tumultuous journey in search of a better life in America. This is an eye-opening account of the injustices, abuse and discrimination faced by immigrants in post-Second World War America.
No book captures more clearly and compellingly the horrific, inspiring, and vital histories and stories of Native Americans than Brown’s.
I love the ways that Brown offers a profoundly new perspective on the American West, on the foundational myths that too often limit the way we see ourselves and the realities with which we must grapple instead, and on Indigenous communities as an essential part of the American story at every stage.
Revisionist Westerns are one of my very favorite genres, and this is the best one I know.
The American West, 1860-1890: years of broken promises, disillusionment, war and massacre.
Beginning with the Long Walk of the Navajos and ending with the massacre of Sioux at Wounded Knee, this extraordinary book tells how the American Indians lost their land, lives and liberty to white settlers pushing westward. Woven into a an engrossing saga of cruelty, treachery and violence are the fascinating stories of such legendary figures as Sitting Bull, Cochise, Crazy Horse and Geronimo.
First published in 1970, Dee Brown's brutal and compelling narrative changed the way people thought about the original inhabitants of America, and focused attention…
There have been Asian Americans for as long as there’s been an America, and indeed in places like California Asian communities were there before the United States was.
That’s just one of the countless surprising and crucial lessons that I first learned from Takaki’s sweeping and magisterial history of the U.S., and every time I dip back into this book, I learn something new about where we’ve been, who we are, and what we can be if we better remember all of our communities and stories.
I am inspired every day by what Takaki accomplished and shared and what his book helps us understand.
Ronald Takaki's "brilliant revisionist history of America" (Publishers Weekly) is a landmark work of American history retells American history from the bottom up, through the lives of many minorities - Native Americans, African Americans, Jewish Americans, Irish Americans, Asian Americans, Latino Americans, and others - who helped create this country's mighty economy and rich mosaic culture. A Different Mirror brilliantly illuminates our country's defining strengths as it reveals America as a nation peopled by the world.
The best 21st-century American literature builds on all that has come before but at the same time offers us something profoundly new, and I don’t know any book that does both those crucial things better than Henríquez’s novel.
I love that this intimate story of one undocumented family turns a mirror to our collective community, that it is defined by 2014 contexts but reveals timeless truths about love and loss, and that every time I return to it, Henríquez both rips my heart out and heals me.
The worst and best of us are here on every bracing and moving page.
A stunning novel of hopes and dreams, guilt and love—a book that offers a resonant new definition of what it means to be American and "illuminates the lives behind the current debates about Latino immigration" (The New York Times Book Review).
When fifteen-year-old Maribel Rivera sustains a terrible injury, the Riveras leave behind a comfortable life in Mexico and risk everything to come to the United States so that Maribel can have the care she needs. Once they arrive, it’s not long before Maribel attracts the attention of Mayor Toro, the son of one of their new neighbors, who sees…
When we talk about patriotism in America, we tend to mean one form: the version captured in shared celebrations like the national anthem and the Pledge of Allegiance. But as Ben Railton argues, that celebratory patriotism is just one of four distinct forms: celebratory, the communal expression of an idealized America; mythic, the creation of national myths that exclude certain communities; active, acts of service and sacrifice for the nation; and critical, arguments for how the nation has fallen short of its ideals that seek to move us toward that more perfect union.
In Of Thee I Sing, Railton defines those four forms of American patriotism, using the four verses of “America the Beautiful” as examples of each type, and traces them across our histories.
The plan was insane. The trap seemed to snap shut on Bruce and Maggie Tate, an isolation forced on them by the pandemic and America's growing political factionalism. Something had to change.
Maggie's surprising answer: buy a boat, learn to pilot it, and embark on the Great Loop. With no experience, and knowing little about seafaring, diesel motors, or navigation, Maggie, Bruce, and the family dog decided to take on the six-thousand-mile journey down inland rivers, around the Gulf and Atlantic coasts, and across the Great Lakes. They would have to navigate canals, rivers, seas, and locks. But along the…
Currently Away: How Two Disenchanted People Traveled the Great Loop for Nine Months and Returned to the Start, Energized and Optimistic
