America, U.S.A.

“No one understands the excruciating interiors of our ‘original sin’ better than Eddie Glaude. His scholarship extends into the darkest corners of our past. His insight offers fragments of a map leading to higher ground.”—Ken Burns

“Intriguing . . . Perfectly timed [and] refreshingly honest . . . Despite his despair, Glaude concludes that ‘the past still offers resources for us to freedom-dream.’ So, too, does this book.”—The New York Times

“America, U.S.A. is a bracing and elegant analysis of the contradiction at the heart of the American experiment: a country that claims to be committed to equality also adheres to white supremacy. Glaude opens a necessary conversation as we reflect on the meaning of our country’s 250th anniversary.”—Annette Gordon-Reed, Harvard University, Pulitzer Prize– and National Book Award–winning author of The Hemingses of Monticello

“Eddie Glaude reckons with the power of our stated values—liberty, freedom, equality, and independence—in the dim light of our actual unwillingness to share, sacrifice, yield, and prosper for the national good. Glaude is honest, bracing, and devastatingly brilliant.”—Min Jin Lee, author of Free Food for Millionaires and Pachinko, a National Book Award Finalist

“This is a thoughtful, insightful, beautifully written book that is timely and welcomed in these perilous times.”—Bryan Stevenson, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Just Mercy

“With exquisite prose, stunning moral clarity, abundant heart and soul, and utter genius, yet again Eddie Glaude proves why he is so often referred to as the conscience of the nation. It makes the stakes of America’s complex, anguished, and beautiful story clear as a bell.”—Imani Perry, Harvard University, National Book Award–winning author of South to America

“Glaude at once anticipates and rues the tumult of 2026, in a divided America whose reckoning with race and history remains woefully unfinished.”—Jill Lepore, Harvard University, New York Times bestselling author of This America

“Glaude provides a diagnosis of our current national shame, of our most bitter contradictions between promises and disappointments, and a vision of how real hope is born in a deep, transcendent sense of tragedy.”—David W. Blight, Yale University, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom

“As we approach the semi-quincentennial of American independence, Glaude has gifted us with a guide to understanding the history of our current moment and offers us ideas on how we can, in truth, forge a more perfect union.”—Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Harvard University, New York Times bestselling author of The Black Church

“Glaude 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.”—Publishers Weekly, starred review

“A charged renunciation of American unfreedom that could not be timelier.”—Kirkus Reviews