Recommended Reading

Common Sense

Thomas Paine

1776

Founding

Forty-odd pages that turned a tax dispute into a case for independence. Paine wrote for people who read one pamphlet a year, and the plainness of it is the point: the argument for self-government has to be sayable in ordinary words or it is not really an argument for self-government.

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The Federalist Papers

Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay

1788

Founding

Eighty-five newspaper essays written at speed to win one state's ratification vote, and still the closest thing we have to the Constitution's own account of itself. Read Ten and Fifty-One first; they are about what to do when people cannot be trusted to be good.

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1776

David McCullough

2005

Founding

A single year at ground level, mostly in retreat. McCullough's Washington is not a monument but a man losing battles and holding an army together anyway, which is the harder and more useful thing to understand about him.

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Founding Brothers

Joseph J. Ellis

2000

Founding

Six episodes among men who did not agree with each other and did not much like each other. It is the best short answer to anyone who imagines the founding generation spoke with one voice.

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Democracy in America

Alexis de Tocqueville

1835

Expansion

A young French aristocrat spends nine months here and writes the book Americans still quote at each other two centuries later. His subject is not government but habit: the associations, the restlessness, the equality of manners, and what each of them costs.

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Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave

Frederick Douglass

1845

Expansion

Douglass wrote it at twenty-seven to prove he had been who he said he was. The famous passage is about learning to read; the deeper one is about what a country does to itself when it decides some people may not.

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Undaunted Courage

Stephen E. Ambrose

1996

Expansion

Lewis and Clark from the inside of Meriwether Lewis's journals. The continent in these pages is not empty and not waiting, and Ambrose is good on both the scale of the achievement and the price other people paid for it.

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What Hath God Wrought

Daniel Walker Howe

2007

Expansion

The half-century between Jackson and the Civil War, told through the telegraph, the railroad and the revival meeting. The argument is that communication, more than conquest, is what actually made a nation out of the distance.

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Battle Cry of Freedom

James M. McPherson

1988

Conflict and Reunion

One volume, the whole war, and still the book most often handed to someone who wants to understand it. McPherson keeps the politics and the fighting in the same frame, which is the only way either makes sense.

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Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant

Ulysses S. Grant

1885

Conflict and Reunion

Written against the clock while he was dying, to leave his family something. The prose is famously plain and famously good, and the modesty of it is not a pose: Grant explains decisions the way a man explains work he had to do.

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Team of Rivals

Doris Kearns Goodwin

2005

Conflict and Reunion

Lincoln through the men who wanted his job and ended up in his cabinet. It is a book about a specific political skill — keeping people who dislike each other working on the same problem — and about how rare that skill turns out to be.

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The Republic for Which It Stands

Richard White

2017

Conflict and Reunion

Reconstruction and the Gilded Age together, which is how they were actually lived. White is unsentimental about a period the country has often preferred to skip, and clear about how much of the modern republic was settled in it.

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The Power Broker

Robert A. Caro

1974

The American Century

How one unelected man reshaped New York for forty years. It is very long and worth every page: the best study we have of how power is actually accumulated and spent in a democracy, and what it does to the person holding it.

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The Right Stuff

Tom Wolfe

1979

The American Century

Test pilots, then astronauts, and the unspoken code that sorted one from another. Wolfe is having enormous fun, and underneath the fun is a serious question about what a country wants from its heroes.

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The Making of the Atomic Bomb

Richard Rhodes

1986

The American Century

Forty years of physics and six years of frantic engineering, told as one story. Rhodes refuses to separate the discovery from the consequence, which is what makes it a moral book as well as a technical one.

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Parting the Waters

Taylor Branch

1988

The American Century

The civil rights years from 1954 to 1963, at the level of individual meetings and individual nerve. The first of three volumes, and the one that shows how much of the movement was ordinary people deciding, repeatedly, to go anyway.

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The Warmth of Other Suns

Isabel Wilkerson

2010

The American Century

Six million people leaving the South over six decades, told through three of them. Wilkerson spent fifteen years on it, and the result reads like a novel about the largest internal migration in the country's history.

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American Nations

Colin Woodard

2011

What Comes Next

The argument that there was never one America but eleven regional cultures, each founded by different people for different reasons, and that the borders between them still show up in how we vote, build and argue. A useful corrective to any map with fifty pieces on it.

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Bowling Alone

Robert D. Putnam

2000

What Comes Next

The book that made social capital a household phrase, built on decades of data about clubs, churches, unions and dinner parties. Whether or not you accept the diagnosis, the question it asks — what happens to a republic when people stop showing up — is the one this anniversary should be asking.

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Our Towns

James Fallows and Deborah Fallows

2018

What Comes Next

Five years flying a small plane between small cities, looking at what is working rather than what is broken. A deliberately local book, and the best antidote on this list to the habit of judging the country only by the view from its capital.

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