The Founding Fathers have been hailed for centuries as shining examples of men who put their own agendas aside to found a nation. But behind the scenes, there were more petty fights and fraught relationships than signatures on the Declaration of Independence... America's great forebearers fought with each other as bitterly

"We the People." The Constitution begins with those deceptively simple words, but how do Americans define that "We"? In We the People, Ben Railton argues that throughout our history two competing yet interconnected concepts have battled to define our national identity and community: exclusionary and inclusive visions of who gets to be an American. From the earliest moments of European contact with indigenous peoples, through the Revolutionary period's...

"'For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill,' John Winthrop warned his fellow Puritans at New England's founding in 1630. More than three centuries later, Ronald Reagan remade that passage into a timeless celebration of American promise. How were Winthrop's long-forgotten words reinvented as a central statement of American identity and exceptionalism? In As a City on a Hill, leading American intellectual historian Daniel Rodgers...

What can homespun cloth, stuffed birds, quince jelly, and ginseng reveal about the formation of early American national identity? In this wide-ranging and bold new interpretation of American history and its Founding Fathers, Kariann Akemi Yokota shows that political independence from Britain fueled anxieties among the Americans about their cultural inferiority and continuing dependence on the mother country. Caught between their desire to emulate...

"The United States is known as a nation of immigrants. But it is also a nation of xenophobia. In [this book], acclaimed historian Erika Lee shows that an irrational fear, hatred, and hostility toward immigrants has been a defining feature of our nation from the colonial era to the Trump era. Americans have been wary of almost every group of foreigners that has come to the United States. Benjamin Franklin ridiculed German immigrants for their 'strange...

"This in-depth analysis of the American imperialism debate after the Spanish-American War of 1898 elucidates how Americans understood their international role and national identity during a crucial period of their foreign relations. Transcending the immediate historical context, this book also explores why such debates remain similar and why they end up affirming a belief in American exceptionalism. Obituaries for the idea have frequently been written...

"Jorge Ramos, an Emmy award-winning journalist and Univision's longtime anchorman and widely considered the 'voice of the voiceless' within the Latino community, was forcefully removed from an Iowa press conference in 2015 by then-candidate Donald Trump after trying to ask about his plans on immigration. In this personal manifesto, Ramos sets out to examine what it means to be a Latino immigrant, or just an immigrant, in present-day America. Using...

From maps, monuments, and architectural features to stamps and currency, images of Native Americans have been used again and again on visual expressions of American national identity since before the country's founding. In this in-depth study, Cécile R. Ganteaume argues that these representations are not empty symbols but reflect how official and semi-official government institutions -- from the U.S. Army and the Department of the Treasury to the...