Philip Eldred

The author has chosen to break from the tradition of rendering history as a series of "major events," and instead tells the story of America as the story of how the American identity was constructed and revised though ongoing and often contradictory discourses. The events discussed are the events that reveal the most context for those discourses or that gave them direction. This is an incredibly helpful approach that delivers a history that can be useful not just for military strategists, trivia enthusiasts, or those with an interest in romanticizing the past as a progressive narrative in which the present is the culmination of a series of preceding improvements. While some reviewers accuse the author of a liberal bias, these claims are hard to substantiate with reference to the text itself. The author does offer a critique, but it is one of how inalienable rights and self-evident truths have been sacrificed by both liberals and conservatives on the cynical altar of power and persuasion. This is exactly the approach to history that we need in this moment if we hope to understand ourselves or to reassemble any coherent and continuous idea of what it is to be American.