Covering most of America’s history, here are 10 single-volume books discussing the most important eras in US history.
If you’ve ever been to the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., you’ll know it’s a majestic site, with the 19-foot-tall Georgia white marble statue of Honest Abe overlooking the Reflecting Pool and then further off, the Washington Monument and the U.S. Capitol.
Something you presumably didn’t see on your visit, however, is a massive 50,000-square-foot foundation built to keep the whole thing from sinking into the swamps of D.C. It’s called the Undercroft, and it’s been a tightly held secret for decades. In June, the Department of the Interior will invite the public to see the hidden vault, Secretary Doug Burgum announced Sunday:
WASHINGTON — Thousands of Americans on Sunday converged on the National Mall to mark the country’s 250th birthday with a prayer festival featuring religious music and speeches by leaders from across faiths.
In February, President Trump declared May 17 a national day of prayer and a time “to rededicate America as one nation under God” in a move that energized evangelicals.
“This is a recognition of the deeply embedded history and religious and moral tradition of the country,” House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) told “Fox News Sunday” about Sunday’s massive religious gathering in DC. //
The May 17 date for the national prayer days traces its origins to America’s early days.
Shortly before the signing of the Declaration of Independence, the colonial Congress declared May 17, 1776, a national day of fasting and prayer
From Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch and bestselling author Janie Nitze! Explore the courage and sacrifice of some of the heroes of the American Revolution and the stories behind the document that started it all—The Declaration of Independence.
In the spring of 1776, the streets of Philadelphia buzzed with the sounds of revolution. Talk of war and rumors of spies swirled in the air. Noisy debates spilled out of taverns. The State House bell tolled urgently, calling men to meetings and momentarily drowning out the normal hum of the port city.
Dive into the stories of ordinary people willing to do extraordinary things, from iconic figures like Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, Ben Franklin, and Paul Revere, to lesser-known revolutionaries such as Caesar Rodney, Thomas Paine, and Mary Katherine Goddard. These great men and women risked all they had—their property, freedom, and ultimately their lives—to secure a better life for their children and grandchildren. Packed with firsthand accounts and vivid depictions of the patriots’ struggle for freedom, Justice Gorsuch’s and Janie Nitze’s debut children’s book thoughtfully investigates the foundations of our country, centering the human experience at the heart of it all.
Celebrate America’s 250th birthday with the Heroes of 1776, a celebration of the ideals upon which this country stands, told with humanity in only the way Justice Gorsuch and Janie Nitze can. //
Carolyn
5 out of 5 stars
Be prepared to be moved by this book!
Reviewed in the United States on May 6, 2026
Format: Hardcover
Verified Purchase
I ordered this book because I heard Justice Gorsuch promoting the book in a TV interview. I liked what he said, and I thought it might be a good gift for my younger relatives. I’m cautious about gifting books that I haven’t read, especially for children. So upon its arrival, I sat down to read it and I was so moved that it caught me off guard. I studied American history and the creation of the Declaration of Independance in high school and in college. I’ve seen the movies. I’ve watched the documentaries. I’ve even gone to DC and viewed the document. I know the story, or at least I thought I did. But not like this. This story made it real, because, to use the authors’ words, “At the heart of it all were ordinary people willing to do extraordinary things and risk all they had to secure a better life for themselves, their children, and generations to come.“ They didn’t teach this part of the story in school. I never knew how extraordinary these ordinary people were. I have a new appreciation for the Declaration of Independence and for the men and women who sacrificed so much to create this experiment, we call America. This book is not just for children. It is for everyone of any age. Order a copy or a few. You, can thank me later.
It's that sharp decline in young people's knowledge of how and why America was founded, and our form of government, that prompted Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch to write "Heroes of 1776: The Story of the Declaration." The book is aimed at both school-aged kids and adults. During a recent interview promoting the book, Gorsuch gave some startling figures:
"Only about 13% of kids today in eighth grade are proficient in American history — [and just] 22% in civics. Six out of 10 adults would fail our citizenship test." //
Gorsuch added that much of his inspiration for the book came from former Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, who founded a civics non-profit after her time on the nation's highest court. Gorsuch said of O'Connor and her work,
"As she was leaving the court, she reflected that civic education in this country is a problem. And for a lot of reasons, it's simply not being taught anymore."
Gorsuch offered up some other disturbing facts. In 2019, only one-third of Americans could name all three branches of government. He stated that this was concerning, given the fact that all three branches "interact" and "check" one another against overreach. //
We know why American history and civics are no longer taught in public schools. The agenda of the teachers' unions is not for students to be knowledgeable in history and civics, but in climate change, transgender issues, and why America is inherently a racist nation. They know that if kids are taught about history or civics, it will be that much harder to indoctrinate them on left-wing ideology and hate the country.
ALSO READ: How Much Confidence Do Americans Have in the Supreme Court? A New Poll Says Not Much
Gorsuch said that history and civics education isn't a left- or right-issue for him and his fellow justices. He added, "If you polled the nine of us in our conference room, one thing we could all agree on is the importance of learning American history."
That agreement among the justices on Americans' knowledge of history and civics is encouraging. Neil Gorsuch summed it up, saying, "Because how else are you going to carry this thing forward? Somebody has to run the zoo." //
TheBlaze @theblaze
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Justice Neil Gorsuch: “We’re a creedal nation. What unites us is not a religion, not a race, it’s a belief in those ideas in the Declaration of Independence.”
7:37 PM · May 6, 2026
Someday there is going to be a movie made about this rescue mission in Iran.
But man, what a morale booster for our military to know that the Secretary of War and Commander-in-Chief will blow up $300 million worth of our own military aircraft to rescue one US soldier.
No man left behind!
God bless our troops!
Military personnel matter to President Trump. At $300 million a troop the 1.3 million people in uniform means they are worth 390 trillion dollars (a million times a million is a trillion).
To Joe Biden, they were worth nothing.
He left 13 behind to die in Afghanistan and he looked at his watch repeatedly when their bodies came home.
But for a moment, look at our military’s rescue through the eyes of the enemy.
Iran had two men downed inside Iran and somehow its military was unable to find them, while the military from a nation thousands of miles away rescued them. It was like a groundball going through a fielder’s legs and costing his team a World Series game.
The rescue feels like victory because it is.
"Now, these are not routine operations. They were high-risk, high-stakes missions conducted in the heart of enemy territory.
"This was not just barely into Iran. This was deep into Iran, involving coordinated strikes to suppress threats, deception tactics to protect our teams, and full synchronization across air, ground, and special operations.
"The Iranians are still asking themselves right now, how did the Americans do this?"
Of the first mission, Hegseth said:
"The first mission, the first of two, was an audacious daylight thunder run right up the middle.
"It was authorized in less than two hours from that pilot going down, when we knew where he was, and it was authorized in the middle of the night because anybody that’s worked for this man knows he’s up in the middle of the night." //
"I looked up at my screen when the final mission was complete inside our SCIF, our secure facility.
"And we have a running VTC, a running coordination cell, and the top of it read 45 hours and 56 minutes.
"For 45 hours and 56 minutes, we held that call open for coordination.
"From the moment our pilots went down, our mission was unblinking.
"The call never dropped.
"The meeting never stopped.
"The planning never ceased."
the x algorithm just surfaced a bunch of pro-america posts from japan, reminding us of what we've known for a while: the japanese really are america's best friends //
“The largest cultural exchange in history just dropped,” remarked X’s Head of Product Nikita Bier on Sunday, referring to the onslaught of translated Japanese content that flooded the X timeline last week.
Alysa Liu is an American figure skater whose family fled China and faced harassment and persecution by Chinese authorities. She won gold. You might have missed it. The American press corps chose, instead, to praise Eileen Gu, an American skier with family ties to the Chinese communist party. Gu skied for and was paid by China. The press elevated her over American athletes until shifting to hate our hockey team.
The Indians who sold Manhattan were bilked, all right, but they didn’t mind—the land wasn’t theirs anyway //
By now it is probably too late to do anything about it, but the unsettling fact remains that the so-called sale of Manhattan Island to the Dutch in 1626 was a totally illegal deal; a group of Brooklyn Indians perpetrated the swindle, and they had no more right to sell Manhattan Island than the present mayor of White Plains would have to declare war on France. When the Manhattan Indians found out about it they were understandably furious, but by that time the Dutch had too strong a foothold to be dislodged—by the Indians, at any rate—and the eventual arrival of one-way avenues and the Hamburg Heaven Crystal Room was only a matter of time.
In the Age of Discovery, maps held closely guarded secrets for the kings, adventurers, and merchants who first acquired them.
he New York Post is counting down to America’s 250th birthday with a look back at the nation’s — and the paper’s — history. We’re revisiting 250 notable covers and articles from our archives, starting with the very first paper Alexander Hamilton published on Nov. 16, 1801, when it was known as the New-York Evening Post.
“…while cleaning up the construction mess, out of the corner of my eye there lied a small blue envelope that had most [likely] been dropped into the wall as the house was being built almost 100 years prior! It was a letter sent from a sister in Bantry, Ireland, to a man named Con Shea here in Casper, Wyoming.”
“It was a letter thanking Mr. Shea for a present he had sent to his family back home in Ireland,” Smith told the Daily Mail. “There was also some catching up and keeping him abreast of the goings on back there in Ireland.”
Smith did some research to learn more about the man who built the home, who “…had immigrated to the US, and had become a very successful sheep herder here in Wyoming,” Smith explained to the outlet.
Ten years after the end of ground combat in Vietnam, the US returned to military intervention, instigating the invasion of Grenada to restore order.
McCullough says that it was Washington and his army that won the war for American independence. “He was not a brilliant strategist or tactician, not a gifted orator, not an intellectual. At several crucial moments he had shown marked indecisiveness. He had made serious mistakes in judgment. But experience had been his great teacher from boyhood, and in this his greatest test, he learned steadily from experience. Above all, Washington never forgot what was at stake and he never gave up.” Without Washington, there would be no America.
There are many things to celebrate during our nation’s semiquincentennial celebrations, and many men to honor for their part in our country’s birth: Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Alexander Hamilton, Benjamin Franklin, and John Hancock among them. But no one looms larger than George Washington, who today seems almost mythical. At Washington’s funeral, Henry “Light-Horse Harry” Lee famously eulogized Washington as, “first in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of his countrymen.” In 2026, it is our duty to ensure that honorific remains as true as when it was first spoken.
Watch as Freedom 250 transforms the iconic Washington Monument into the world’s tallest birthday candle in honor of our Nation’s 250th birthday. From New Year’s Eve through January 5th, 2026, a six-night projection-mapping spectacle will illuminate the Monument, creating an immersive, luminous canvas that narrates our Nation’s discovery, expansion, independence, and vision for the future. This Washington Monument illumination is the opening signature moment of a year-long series of marquee national events celebrating the triumph of the American spirit.
Acts will play every hour on the hour.
https://www.youtube.com/live/wPTjQS84Lxw?si=lwecS5n1_klD8l78
Links to those before us broaden our perspective, provide us with a sense of place in time and make us part of a larger narrative and a shared experience.
We begin to sense a tradition worth preserving and passing along to those who come after us.
Tocqueville made this point in “Democracy in America” by distinguishing between instinctive patriotism, rooted in custom and a sense of belonging based on place and personal loyalty, and reflective patriotism, based more on the opinions of free citizens, who understand their common liberties and their shared responsibilities with their fellow citizens.
This latter, more thoughtful form of patriotism, Tocqueville argued, is shaped by the exercise of individual rights within republican institutions and by what Tocqueville called “self-interest well understood.”
Indeed, one of the reasons Tocqueville admired America so much was that it bred both types of patriotism, a spirited attachment to American self-government as well as a reasoned devotion to the general principles of natural right and human liberty.
Tocqueville concluded that a patriotism in which particular loyalties and universal purposes reinforce each other was the source of the community bond and national cohesion needed to perpetuate democratic societies.
Without patriotism — instinctive patriotism for sure, but especially reflective patriotism — democratic peoples would become preoccupied with narrow, private concerns and come to neglect their civic duties.
The result is social division and civic apathy, as formerly self-governing citizens become themselves passive subjects in a modern, impersonal nation-state.
Without this dual patriotism of both the heart and the head, America’s thriving republic, Tocqueville famously warned, would be overtaken by a new form of democratic despotism that flattens the human spirit.
Today, patriotism is often misunderstood and criticized as an unthinking allegiance to chauvinistic urges.
Yet it is a love of country that is thoughtful as well as passionate — not “the impostures of pretended patriotism” Washington warned us against — that stands confident against the cultural relativism that plagues our society and undermines the defense of liberty by its disingenuous embrace and tendency toward despotic self-assertion.
Patriotism, rightly understood, has always been the civic antidote to what C. S. Lewis called “the poison of subjectivism.” //
Having rejected the Old World’s rule of accident and force in favor of government by reflection and choice, the Founders understood education — heretofore an elite privilege of the upper class and often a tool of state control — to take on a new civic role in service to popular government.
In a republican regime, built on equal rights and the consent of the governed, education not only shapes the private character that allows the individual to govern the self but also imparts the principles necessary for those individuals to practice the arts of self-government.
The student is transformed into the citizen through the expansion and deepening of the natural attachments as well as the cultivation of the civic knowledge necessary to perpetuate free government.
“The Education of youth is, in all governments, an object of the first consequence,” Noah Webster wrote in opening his 1788 essay on the topic. “The impressions received in early life, usually form the characters of individuals; a union of which forms the general character of a nation.” //
Education begins at home, when the habits and manners are established, first by parents, who have the primary responsibility for the upbringing of their children, and then by family, church, community and the first lessons of early instruction.
Like in the great nations of Europe, Webster maintained the formal educational system to be adopted and pursued in America should focus on the foundations of knowledge: reading, writing and arithmetic, as well as a basic understanding of the sciences and the outlines of geography and history.
But in republican America, Webster argued popular education must also “implant, in the minds of the American youth, the principles of virtue and of liberty; and inspire them with just and liberal ideas of government, and with an inviolable attachment to their own country.”
At a young age, this inculcation was especially to be done by teaching history: “every child in America should be acquainted with his own country. He should read books that furnish him with ideas that will be useful to him in life and practice. As soon as he opens his lips, he should rehearse the history of his own country; he should lisp the praise of liberty, and of those illustrious heroes and statesmen, who have wrought a revolution in her favor.”
Thomas Jefferson and James Madison concurred in a report they authored as commissioners of the University of Virginia.
Beyond improving the faculties and morals, the objects of a general education should be for the student “to understand his duties to his neighbors and country, and to discharge with competence the functions confided to him by either,” and “to instruct the mass of our citizens in these, their rights, interests and duties, as men and citizens.”
The objects of “the higher branches of education” — the colleges and universities scattered around the country — were “to develop the reasoning faculties of our youth, enlarge their minds, cultivate their morals, and instill into them the precepts of virtue and order” and “to form them to habits of reflection and correct action, rendering them examples of virtue to others, and of happiness within themselves.”
American higher education should “form the statesmen, legislators and judges, on whom public prosperity and individual happiness are so much to depend.”
Colleges and universities, too, had an obligation to make good citizens.
And the document around which this citizen education was to be constructed, the creed of America’s civic life and political identity, its temporal scripture and its epic poetry, was the Declaration of Independence.
The Declaration is the defining act of the great drama that is the American founding.
When Jefferson and Madison outlined an educational curriculum with “especial attention to the principles of government which shall be inculcated therein,” their first reading was the Declaration, which Jefferson called “an expression of the American mind.”
It is what the ancients described as the prelude to the laws, meant to define the regime and animate what is to come.
Although a “merely revolutionary document,” the Declaration of Independence contains, as Abraham Lincoln wrote on the eve of Civil War, “an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times,” put there “that today, and in all coming days, it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling-block to the very harbingers of re-appearing tyranny and oppression.”
Lincoln also said once that public opinion “always has a ‘central idea,’ from which all its minor thoughts radiate.”
America’s central idea is the Declaration, and everything else radiates from that. //
By defining our common loves — our native country and our common commitment to republican government based on equal rights, political liberty and the consent of the governed — the Declaration unites our hearts and our minds in a civic friendship of enlightened patriotism.
We must know the Declaration if we truly are to love America.
From the new book “The Making of the American Mind: The Story of our Declaration of Independence.”
On Christmas morning, General Washington issued orders that the Continental Army was going across that river to kick some Hessian butts. He ordered rations cooked for three days, fresh flints to be put in every musket, and he also ordered that even the musicians and officers were to arm themselves, not with the usual swords and pistols, but with muskets. The Continental Army was betting everything. Bear in mind that in 1776, most of these men couldn't even swim; further, when this happened, the North American continent was in the throes of the Little Ice Age.
General Washington crossed with the first wave. He was leading his men, as a good commander should. By daybreak, the crossing was complete. //
When it was all over, the Hessians had suffered 22 killed, including the commander, Colonel Johann Rall, along with 83 wounded and almost 900 captured. The Americans suffered two killed and five wounded. By noon on the 26th, Washington's forces, with the Hessian prisoners, had crossed safely back across the Delaware into Pennsylvania.
Historian David Hackett Fischer later wrote of this event:
Until Washington crossed the Delaware, the triumph of the old order seemed inevitable. Thereafter, things would never be the same again.
Unlike the battle of Midway, the attack on Trenton wasn't the turning point - but it was a turning point. After Trenton, after that nighttime crossing of an icy river, in the depths of one of the coldest winters in written history, American determination and capability were never again in doubt. General Washington had established himself as a dangerous foe to the British, ... //
We're Americans. If you mess with us, we will cross a frozen river at night to kill you in your sleep. On Christmas.
Despite our march toward electronic money, an important message is still jingling in pockets across America, “E pluribus unum.” The Latin phrase stamped on coins and bills means “Out of many, one.” It was coined in 1776 for the original design of the Great Seal of the United States. The Founding Fathers wanted to underscore the 13 colonies that came together as a single nation. Since then, it has come to include many different people forming one nation.
It is a concept so important that in the Coinage Act of 1873, Congress required “E pluribus unum” be inscribed on every coin, along with “In God We Trust.” We should take these mottos seriously.
What does appear to be true is that in 1902, when young Archie was just eight years old, he did sneak a tree into the White House and kept it upstairs in a closet. He supposedly had White House staff members help him find lights and ornaments, and he added a gift for each of his family members, including the Roosevelts' pets. On Christmas morning, he finally shared the surprise with his family, who were delighted by it. The president even let his children continue the tradition after that.
Here's what Roosevelt wrote in a letter to a friend about that Christmas:
Yesterday Archie got among his presents a small rifle from me and a pair of riding boots from his mother. He won’t be able to use the rifle until next summer, but he has gone off very happy in the riding boots for a ride on the calico pony Algonquin, the one you rode the other day. Yesterday morning at a quarter of seven all the children were up and dressed and began to hammer at the door of their mother’s and my room, in which their six stockings, all bulging out with queer angles and rotundities, were hanging from the fireplace. So their mother and I got up, shut the window, lit the fire (taking down the stockings of course), put on our wrappers and prepared to admit the children.