AMERICA, U.S.A‪.‬

Celebrated public intellectual Eddie S. Glaude Jr. delivers a powerful and deeply reflective examination of America’s recurring historical failures and the nation’s enduring struggle to confront the truths hidden beneath its most celebrated myths—especially during the grand anniversaries that encourage patriotic nostalgia over honest reckoning.

America, U.S.A., masterfully crafted and emotionally resonant, offers a sweeping meditation on the American experiment and the burdens carried through its history. Drawing from the voices and insights of thinkers and writers such as W.E.B. Du Bois, Herman Melville, John Dos Passos, James Baldwin, and Martin Luther King Jr., Glaude constructs a layered portrait of a country forever wrestling with the tension between its democratic ideals and its lived realities. With moral clarity and intellectual courage, he challenges readers to reconsider the stories Americans tell themselves about freedom, innocence, and national identity.

Structured around the major commemorations of America’s defining anniversaries across 250 years, the book explores how each celebration becomes a battleground over memory, power, and belonging. From the Centennial of 1876 to the Semiquincentennial of 2026, Glaude reveals how moments meant to unite the nation often expose its deepest fractures—particularly around race, citizenship, and democracy itself.

At once devastatingly honest and profoundly humane, America, U.S.A. is both a critique and a meditation: an unflinching exploration of the country’s failures and a searching reflection on whether America can ever move beyond the myths that have shaped it. Urgent, lyrical, and intellectually fearless, the book calls on readers to confront the past truthfully in order to imagine a more democratic future.