These Truths: A History of the United States

by Jill Lepore

Before his death in 1433, Zheng He, a Chinese Muslim,

The English had come to believe—as an article of faith, as a matter of belonging to the “English nation”—that they were nobler than the Spanish: more just, wiser, gentler, and dedicated to liberty.

English, unlike the Spanish, were men of mercy and love, liberty and charity.

“In the beginning,” the Englishman John Locke would write, “all the world was America.” In America, everything became a beginning.