If you read
Letters from an American
Read these
Democracy Awakening
The historian's long view of how American democracy has been challenged and reclaimed, written for the readers who start their mornings with her newsletter. Richardson sets...
How the South Won the Civil War
The argument that ideas defeated on the battlefield did not die there. Richardson traces how an oligarchic vision of who truly counts as an American migrated...
Reconstruction
The definitive history of America's unfinished revolution, the years after the Civil War when the country tried to build a multiracial democracy and was forced, by...
The Second Founding
The 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments read as what they were: a refounding of the country, an attempt to write the promise of equality into the...
The Field of Blood
Congress was a violent place before the Civil War, and Freeman documents it: the canings, the brawls, the pistols carried onto the floor, the routine intimidation...
The Declaration of Independence
The source. We hold these truths to be self-evident. Everything the brand draws from, and much of what the country claims to be, begins in this...
The Constitution of the United States
The operating document, the one that turns the Declaration's promise into a working machine of divided power. The Preamble alone seeds half the catalogue: we the...
These Truths
The single-volume national history most scholars think impossible, attempted anyway, and organized around the country's own stated ideals. Lepore asks whether the facts of American history...
Field Notes on the Republic
The Reading Room in motion. A fresh essay every morning on the republic, its arguments, and its history, the same long view as the shelf, written...