This Is America: 50 Moments That Made Us: A Patriotic History of the United States — 250 Years, 50 Defining Moments

The republic is not a destination. It is a direction.From the farmers who stood on Lexington Green before sunrise in 1775 to the passengers of Flight 93 who voted in the back of a hijacked aircraft in 2001, This Is America tells the story of a nation that has never stopped becoming what it promised to be.Across fifty carefully chosen moments, Nicolas D. Ware traces 250 years of American history with honesty, clarity, and patriotic conviction. This is not a book that looks away. The Trail of Tears is here. The collapse of Reconstruction is here. My Lai is here. But so are Valley Forge, D-Day, the Marshall Plan, the Letter from Birmingham Jail, and the night the Berlin Wall fell. The pride and the grief belong to the same country, and only by holding both can we understand either.Ware writes as a conservative who believes in the Constitution, the separation of powers, and the institutions generations of Americans built and defended. He writes for readers who still believe the American experiment is worth understanding, preserving, and renewing.Inside are fifty defining moments across seven parts:The Founding — from Lexington to the first transfer of powerThe Trial — slavery, the Civil War, Gettysburg, AppomattoxThe Building — the Transcontinental Railroad, Ellis Island, the Wright BrothersThe American Century — two World Wars, the Tuskegee Airmen, the 442nd InfantryThe Conscience — Brown v. Board, Birmingham, the Civil Rights ActThe Reckoning — Vietnam, Watergate, the BicentennialThe Present — September 11, Obama, and the unfinished meaning of 250 yearsThis Is America is a history of courage and failure, achievement and betrayal, memory and purpose. It is for readers who know that love of country is strongest when it is honest, and that the American story is still being written. Read more