The United States

American Republics: A Continental History of the United States, 1783–1850 BY ALAN TAYLOR. Norton, 2021, 544 pp.

This volume follows two earlier works, American Colonies and American Revolutions, to form a trilogy by one of the preeminent historians of the period. The plural terms in the second and third titles underline the books’ central theme: that the early history of what became the

United States was not what most Americans have been taught. The real story, Taylor writes in this deeply researched and beautifully written book, is not of a singular revolution that followed a sure path toward nationhood and then swept across the continent with confidence and moral purpose but rather a tale of fragility and intense dispute. The key actors were disparate states, deeply suspicious of one another, to which Americans owed their primary allegiance. Their coming together was so contentious and uncertain that most Americans at the time had reason to think of what they were doing as framing only a union, not a nation. Taylor grippingly describes the yawning gap that opened up between the founding documents’ soaring principles and the reality of white Americans’ behavior. The massive wrongs the majority perpetrated in their oppression of Native Americans and Black slaves were nearly equaled by the terrible treatment they inflicted on free Black people.

The Words That Made Us: America’s Constitutional Conversation, 1760–1840 BY AKHIL REED AMAR. Basic Books, 2021, 832 pp.

With the rare ability to combine history and law, Amar takes a fresh, heterodox look at how “America became America.” Amar, a distinguished professor of law and political science, sees the Declaration of Independence, the U.S. Constitution, and the Bill of Rights as having simply “followed from the logic” of a sophisticated “constitutional conversation” carried out over three decades in letters, newspapers, pamphlets, and courtrooms by the mass of Americans

(or at least white, male, and literate ones). That rolling dialogue, he argues, deserves more credit for the Declaration of Independence than does Thomas Jefferson (merely “a good scribe”) and made a bigger contribution to the Constitution than did James Madison. Scholars have erred in attaching importance to Madison’s essay “Federalist

No. 10” (in The Federalist Papers), Amar claims; at the time of its publication, “almost no one paid any attention” to it. The only founder who really mattered, in Amar’s view, was the relatively silent George Washington: the Constitution was “designed by and for” him alone to such a degree that his two elections as president amounted to re-ratifications of it. Amar seamlessly combines his two disciplines, crafting a swiftly paced, highly iconoclastic narrative and making important legal arcana accessible to all readers.

Rethinking American Grand Strategy EDITED BY ELIZABETH BORGWARDT, CHRISTOPHER MCKNIGHT NICHOLS, AND ANDREW PRESTON. Oxford University Press, 2021, 512 pp.

“Grand strategy” is a term that is as difficult to define as it is widely used by scholars and practitioners. This volume’s editors and contributors believe that the concept needs to be reconceived by extending it in two dimensions. It should be broadened beyond its roots in military affairs and conventionally defined security to include a variety of additional issues, such as immigration, public health, demographics, international assistance, and climate change. It also needs to reach beyond its traditional focus on the state as the only important player to include other influential voices and actors, including, among others, nonprofit interest groups, organized religion, and the business sector. This volume doesn’t address all those areas, but it is a valuable contribution to the task of broadly rethinking the goals and tactics of U.S. foreign policy. The analyses it presents are solidly rooted in history and provide thought-provoking insights into issues and actors that grand strategists rarely consider.

Ethel Rosenberg: An American Tragedy BY ANNE SEBBA. St. Martin’s Press, 2021, 320 pp.

Ethel Rosenberg was the only American woman ever executed for a crime other than murder and, with her husband, Julius, was one of only two Americans ever to face capital punishment for conspiring to commit espionage in peacetime. In her tragic story, told here by an accomplished biographer, she often appears as a human Rorschach test onto which others projected their own passions, largely ignoring her individual identity and massively confusing the question of her guilt or innocence. Her life and death by electrocution, in 1953, were shaped to no small degree by misogyny, antiSemitism, and, above all, a nationwide, exaggerated fear of the Soviet Union. Her mother ignored her both as a child and as an adult and had eyes only for Ethel’s brother David Greenglass, who, ironically, himself spied for the Soviets but was not executed. Not until many years later was it finally revealed that Greenglass had perjured himself, lying

grand jury testimony about Ethel’s involvement in espionage. The government’s case against her was recognized to be extremely weak, but neither President Harry Truman nor President Dwight Eisenhower dared to appear soft on communism by admitting as much and dropping the case. Ultimately, it seems that although she was a Communist, Ethel was not a spy.

Last Best Hope: America in Crisis and Renewal

BY GEORGE PACKER. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021, 240 pp.

A more searing, accurate dissection of Donald Trump and his associates will likely never be written. Trump, Packer writes, is “an all-American flimflam man and demagogue, . . . spawned in a gold-plated sewer.” He was able to articulate so effectively the resentment that is the essence of his supporters’ condition because its taste “was in his mouth, too.” Of Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and a senior official in Trump’s White House “with expertise in nothing,” Packer notes that “he interfered in the work of more competent officials, compromised security protocols, dabbled in conflicts of interest, flirted with violations of federal law and then promised nationwide [covid-19] testing through his business connections, which never materialized.” Packer’s main interest, however, is not Trump and his circle but the country that elected him, since “a failure the size of Trump took the whole of America.” The book focuses on the events of 2020 because “nothing Trump did was more destructive than turning the pandemic into a central front in the partisan war,” thereby causing hundreds of thousands of needless deaths. Packer traces recent U.S. history through a piercingly insightful exploration of what he discerns as four overlapping national narratives. They are not those captured by statistics but those that describe Americans’ “deepest needs and desires . . . [and] convey a moral identity.” He calls them “Free America” (libertarian), “Smart America” (meritocratic), “Real America” (the populists’ mythical provincial village), and “Just America” (more accurately, Unjust America). All have emerged from a half century of rising inequality, which has produced a country that, in Packer’s view, is no longer governable.