America, U.S.A.
How Race Shadows the Nation's Anniversaries
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- $18.99
Publisher Description
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The New York Times bestselling author of Begin Again confronts America’s unfinished story in this blistering reassessment of race, freedom, and the myths that bind us.
“A thoughtful, insightful, beautifully written book that is timely and welcomed in these perilous times.”—Bryan Stevenson, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Just Mercy
“Eddie S. Glaude Jr. opens a necessary conversation as we reflect on the meaning of our country’s 250th anniversary.”—Annette Gordon-Reed, Pulitzer Prize– and National Book Award–winning author of The Hemingses of Monticello
Celebrated public intellectual Eddie S. Glaude, Jr. presents a groundbreaking analysis of the vicious cycles of American history and the country’s enduring refusal to face its true nature—especially at the moments when national anniversaries steer us back toward the mythology meant to disguise the truth.
America, U.S.A., deliberately formulated and beautifully written, details a heart-wrenching exploration of America’s legacy. It is a magnificently complex combination of lessons and voices—from W.E.B. DuBois and John Dos Passos to Herman Melville and Martin Luther King, Jr.—that, together, paint a sprawling and honest tableau of the United States, its complicated past, and ever more tenuous future. Glaude’s is a powerful voice of conscience in our tumultuous world. He pulls no punches, calling on us to interrogate our conceptions of innocence and freedom and the stories we tell ourselves about our past and present.
Centered around the major celebrations of America’s milestone birthdays across 250 years of history, the book offers a riveting look at the battles over who has a stake in writing the American story. Devastatingly candid, profoundly moving, and deeply reflective, America, U.S.A. is a shining meditation on how we must reckon with a grim past in order to strive for the better angels of our future.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Bestseller Glaude (Begin Again) offers a forceful counternarrative to the official commemoration of America's 250th anniversary by surveying the horrors attendant to some of the nation's previous anniversaries. Glaude begins by asserting that it is "dangerous to love something so abstract and so morally dubious" as America, particularly as it is founded on an inherent contradiction. America is both a "nation of laws" dedicated to the "equal standing of each individual" but also "a white Republic," he notes, and it is at moments when the tension between the two "becomes unbearably felt" that "white America risks everything, including the well-being of the country, to resolve it." (He cites both the Civil War and "Donald Trump's ascendance" as examples.) But "history isn't fate," Glaude argues; it's rather a "repository" that allows us "to act today with more than luck." It is in this spirit that Glaude aims to excavate "the usefulness of the past, however ugly." He begins in 1776 with the story of captured fugitive Moses Gordon, who "chose to drown himself rather than submit again to slavery," and, from there, visits several other anniversaries, including the centennial celebration in 1876, which was conducted "as violence choked the life out of Reconstruction," and the 150th celebration in 1926, which arrived during the resurgence of the KKK. The upshot isn't just a searing revisionist history but a stirring view of America as a place "worth fighting for."
