David Reynolds, America, Empire of Liberty: A New History of the United States (New York: Basic Books, 2009), 592 pp., $35.00.
America, Empire of Liberty: A New History of the United States
LET US not mince words. In my judgment, this is the best one-volume history of the United States ever written. To be sure, not many such books are written anymore, mainly because historians have sliced and diced the American past into increasingly smaller segments, the monograph aimed at fellow specialists is the preferred scholarly vehicle, and textbooks covering all of American history are usually multiauthor affairs in which each contributor focuses on his or her designated piece of the chronological terrain.
David Reynolds, author of tomes such as One World Divisible, In Command of History and Rich Relations, on the other hand, begins his story with the migration of Mongolian tribes across the Bering Strait around 12000 BC and ends it with the election of Barack Obama in 2008. Lots of history happened between these dates, of course, and thousands of historians have written millions of pages about-let's see-the meaning of the American Revolution, the embedded cancer that was slavery, the causes and consequences of the Civil War, the emergence of America as a world power, the Great Depression and New Deal, the two World Wars, the Cold War, the civil-rights movement, the Vietnam War, the Reagan Revolution, the War on Terror and the Great Recession. And this, let it be noted, is a highly selective list.
At least on the face of it, no single mind can master this mountain of material, avoid the almost-inevitable factual blunders, negotiate the long-standing scholarly controversies, and control the narrative in clear and at-times-lyrical prose. But that is precisely what Reynolds has done.
