This inviting one-volume history of the United States, from pre-history to the probable 2024 presidential election matchup, has been crafted to illuminate the nation’s past and present for its newest arrivals. “Many scratch their heads over the lack of universal healthcare, the costs of college tuition, home prices and sales tax,” writes Serocold, also noting the tendency for discussions with Americans about “politics, gun control, abortion, immigration, and race relations” to quickly grow heated. Serocold’s history, written in direct and conversational language, illuminates the roots of these features and flashpoints of American life while touring readers through a brisk, to-the-point, era-by-era summation of its development over centuries.

Accessible but nuanced, Serocold’s history proves admirably thorough as it sweeps from early settlement to colonial life to revolution, expansion, and Americans’ wars against indigenous peoples and each other. Serocold honors the history while often placing emphasis on the practical, offering charts showing American place names derived from the languages of various groups of settlers, and demonstrating connections between key examples of perennial American tensions—between federal and state power; innovation and religious fundamentalism; a founding principle of equality and the reality of prejudice—to readers’ contemporary experience. A discussion of the Populist Party notes, with amusing understatement, “Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump have both been labeled populists despite standing for very different things.”

Serocold’s guiding impulse when surveying this complex and often still-contested history is resonance: what do readers need to know to understand the nation’s present? That’s not to say this history is streamlined, as he describes, often with excitement, many individual battles of America’s wars, the ethos and accomplishments of the presidents, romantic myths of the West, the logic behind the electoral college, the roots of “American Exceptionalism” in Puritan preaching, and countless other data points that reveal how life in the United States became what it currently is, right up to Billy Beer, waning religious affiliation, and the January 6 insurrection.

Takeaway: Accessible, illuminating one-volume history of the U.S. for new arrivals.

Comparable Titles: Scholastic's Guide to Civics, Roya Hakakian’s A Beginner's Guide to America.

Production grades
Cover: A-
Design and typography: A
Illustrations: N/A
Editing: A
Marketing copy: A