America, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversaries

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.” (May)