The Shortest History of the United States

I’ve been watching a lot of short videos online recently. The ones showing how a location has changed over the centuries. Manhattan Island and Chicago, for instance, starting as bucolic scenes of nature before transforming into the massive cities they are today. Mud huts to wooden houses to brick structures and finally skyscrapers. 

(One that haunts me is a time-lapse image of the Earth over the next several million years, moving at something like a million years second. Puts an unsettling perspective on our minute lifespans.)

Anyway, reading this book is a little like watching these videos. The first settlers crossing the land bridge from Alaska, 20,000 years before Columbus. Then Columbus himself; the Spanish and French and English colonies; 1620 and the Mayflower; the break with England and the Declaration of Independence; Thomas Jefferson, the 1803 Louisiana Purchase and Lewis and Clark….

On and on it rolls, never stopping too long in any year or decade, but always finding time to examine notable people and events. The Civil War; failed Reconstruction; FDR and the Great Depression; Joe McCarthy and the communist witch hunts; the civil rights movement, 60s riots and Richard Nixon; all the way up to and including Trump and the assault on the Capitol in 2021.

It’s a fascinating ride, watching the swoop and roar of history, the peaks of achievement and the valleys of lies and deceit and oppression. Enough information to give you a good picture; not enough to drown you in detail. (There are whole libraries to provide that.) And, at times, beautifully-worded little observations that illustrate the whole book’s readability, such as this description of Eisenhower:

He was a decent man and not a bad president, but he might have been a better one if occasionally he had set aside the comfortable assurances of his Protestant faith and tried to grasp his country’s other worlds. Reading Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man would have been a good start, or he might have put off Billy Graham one day and had James Baldwin over.