Jill LePore’s These Truths: A History of the United States came out in 2018 but I got to it this year and was glad I did. The audacity of a one-volume history covering a 500+ year arc of the American story, especially when that story has become so contested and fragmented, was a thing to behold. And LePore did it with good sense, urgency, and eyes open to the pitfalls. I’d recommend this book to anyone, along with her very brief follow-up volume which we reviewed as well, This America: The Case for the Nation.
These Truths made it to #8 on our Best Reads list for 2019. You can read the review by clicking on the title.
Heartlands 
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[…] A second history book makes the list in the #7 spot of our annual countdown of Best Reads. Anthony Delbanco, The War Before the War: Fugitive Slaves and the Struggle for America’s Soul from the Revolution to the Civil War, focuses on a potent symbol of antebellum America, the fugitive slave, and shows how the unspooling of the country in the 1850s was foreshadowed by the compromises around slavery made with the Constitution. It made for an enlightening and disturbing read in another era of national unspooling. […]
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