Patrick’s Reviews > These Truths: A History of the United States > Status Update

A nation born in revolution will forever struggle against chaos. A nation founded on universal rights will wrestle against the forces of particularism. A nation that toppled a hierarchy of birth only to erect a hierarchy of wealth will never know tranquility. A nation of immigrants cannot close its borders. And a nation born in contradiction…will fight forever over the meaning of its history.

“But online, where everyone was, in the end, utterly alone, it had become terribly difficult to know much of anything with shy certainty, except how to like and be liked, and, especially, how to hate and be hated.”

“[In 1967], Reagan…told the press he saw ‘no reason on the street today a citizen should be carrying loaded weapons.’”

Leone Baxter and Clem Whitaker are among the unsung villains of American history.

As a black corporal from Alabama put it, “I spent four years in the army to free a bunch of Dutchman and Frenchman, and I’m hanged if I’m going to let the Alabama version of the Germans kick me around when I get home.”