"In this lavishly illustrated volume, stellar historians have written brilliantly incisive essays on American history that both challenge conventional wisdom and illuminate hidden corners of the country's past. A gift to the American republic on its 250th anniversary that will endure." -- Gary Gerstle, author of The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order: America and the World in the Free Market Era"Here talented minds deliver up-to-date research in prose that crackles with energy and insight. It's all here: the power and the overreach, the myth and the hard realities, as well as the current challenge of faded glories. The work is fresh, grounded in new research, and organized with chronological and thematic imagination. On the 250th anniversary of the nation, look no further for a single volume guide to the history of that elusive and complex creation called the United States of America." -- Jefferson Cowie, Pulitzer Prize winning author of Freedom's Dominion: A Saga of White Resistance to Federal Power"A stunning gift to all who seek to better understand the long arc of this country's past-from the deep history of the continent on which the nation would eventually take shape to the present day, when its bedrock ideals remain so fiercely contested. Readers will be dazzled by the scope and richness of the stories and images that come to life on the page, as well as by the depth of historical expertise that situates them across time.

They will also be humbled as they reckon with the extraordinary determination of ordinary people who have struggled, again and again, to realize liberty, justice, and genuine equality of opportunity for all who live here." -- Heather Ann Thompson, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Blood in the Water and Fear and Fury.