nation draft United States
A young country built on old land and a big promise, endlessly arguing with itself about who that promise is for.
Liberty Island · Don Ramey Logan, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Understanding an American in 5 minutes
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A nation built on an idea
Most nations grew out of a shared ancestry; the United States was founded on a creed. The Declaration of 1776 held that "all men are created equal" with rights to "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness", and the Constitution of 1787 is still in force. Many Americans treat these documents as almost sacred, and their political fights are often arguments over what the founders meant. Being American, in this view, is something you can choose.
- The Radicalism of the American Revolution — Gordon S. Wood, Alfred A. Knopf (1992)
- Declaration of Independence: A Transcription — U.S. National Archives
- Give Me Liberty! An American History — Eric Foner, W. W. Norton (2004)
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Freedom and its contradiction
The land of liberty was also a land of slavery. Enslaved Africans arrived in Virginia in 1619, and by 1860 nearly four million people were held in bondage. It took a civil war that killed perhaps 750,000 to end slavery, and a century more of struggle, through the civil rights movement, to end legal segregation. Race remains the deepest fault line in American life, and how to tell this story is itself fiercely contested.
- Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America — Ira Berlin, Belknap Press of Harvard University Press (1998)
- Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era — James M. McPherson, Oxford University Press (1988)
- A Census-Based Count of the Civil War Dead — J. David Hacker, Civil War History (2011)
- Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954–63 — Taylor Branch, Simon & Schuster (1988)
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A continent taken
The country grew from thirteen coastal colonies to the Pacific by purchase, war and dispossession: the removal of Native nations on the Trail of Tears, the conquest of half of Mexico in 1846–48, and the wars for the West. Americans often celebrate the frontier as a story of freedom and grit; for Native Americans, whose 574 federally recognised tribes still govern their own lands, it is a story of loss and survival.
- Unworthy Republic: The Dispossession of Native Americans and the Road to Indian Territory — Claudio Saunt, W. W. Norton (2020)
- Indigenous Continent: The Epic Contest for North America — Pekka Hämäläinen, Liveright (2022)
- A Wicked War: Polk, Clay, Lincoln, and the 1846 U.S. Invasion of Mexico — Amy S. Greenberg, Alfred A. Knopf (2012)
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A nation of immigrants, and of arguments about immigrants
Irish, Germans, Italians, Jews, Poles, Chinese, Mexicans, Filipinos, Indians and many more have made America, and most Americans can name where their family came from. About one in seven residents was born abroad. Each wave has met both welcome and fierce backlash, and who gets to come, and who belongs, is one of the most divisive questions in politics today.
- Coming to America: A History of Immigration and Ethnicity in American Life — Roger Daniels, HarperCollins (1990)
- Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America — Mae M. Ngai, Princeton University Press (2004)
- Mexican Immigrants in the United States — Migration Policy Institute (2024)
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Self-reliance, optimism and the American Dream
Many Americans prize individual freedom, hard work and the belief that anyone can get ahead. Strangers are greeted with easy friendliness; people move, reinvent themselves and start businesses readily. Suspicion of government runs deep, from the Revolution to the Second Amendment right to bear arms. The flip side is less of a safety net than most rich countries, and a habit of judging people by their success.
- Give Me Liberty! An American History — Eric Foner, W. W. Norton (2004)
- American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America — Colin Woodard, Viking (2011)
- For Most U.S. Gun Owners, Protection Is the Main Reason They Own a Gun — Pew Research Center (2023)
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Superpower with a conscience, and a guilty one
Since 1945 the United States has been the world's most powerful country, with bases across the globe. Many Americans see their nation as a force for good, having defeated fascism and won the Cold War; Vietnam and Iraq left many others, on left and right, wary of foreign wars. Most Americans think far less about the rest of the world than the world thinks about America.
- Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929–1945 — David M. Kennedy, Oxford University Press (1999)
- America's Longest War: The United States and Vietnam, 1950–1975 — George C. Herring, McGraw-Hill (1979)
- Costs of War: Human Costs of the Post-9/11 Wars — Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, Brown University (2023)
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Red and blue
Today Americans are deeply divided between a mostly urban, secular, diverse "blue" America that votes Democratic and a mostly rural, religious, whiter "red" America that votes Republican. In 2022, 62% of Republicans and 54% of Democrats viewed the other party very unfavourably. The divide runs through families and shapes what news people trust. But many Americans are simply tired of it.
- As Partisan Hostility Grows, Signs of Frustration With the Two-Party System — Pew Research Center (2022)
- American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America — Colin Woodard, Viking (2011)
The story
Native nations & colonies
1492 – 1774 Native nations and the English colonies
English settlers found Jamestown and Plymouth on land long home to hundreds of Native nations, beginning a contest for the continent that would last nearly three centuries.
- American Colonies: The Settling of North America — Alan Taylor, Viking Penguin (2001)
- Indigenous Continent: The Epic Contest for North America — Pekka Hämäläinen, Liveright (2022)
- American Indian Holocaust and Survival: A Population History since 1492 — Russell Thornton, University of Oklahoma Press (1987)
- Give Me Liberty! An American History — Eric Foner, W. W. Norton (2004)
Read more
- American Colonies: The Settling of North America — Alan Taylor, Viking Penguin (2001)
- Indigenous Continent: The Epic Contest for North America — Pekka Hämäläinen, Liveright (2022)
- American Indian Holocaust and Survival: A Population History since 1492 — Russell Thornton, University of Oklahoma Press (1987)
- Give Me Liberty! An American History — Eric Foner, W. W. Norton (2004)
Americans still argue about which origin story to tell: Pilgrims seeking religious freedom at Thanksgiving, or Native nations losing their land. There are 574 federally recognised tribes today, and many Native Americans experience the national founding story as the start of their dispossession, not their freedom.
When the English arrived, North America was not empty. Hundreds of Native nations, from the Powhatan confederacy in Virginia and the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) in New York to the Pueblos of the Southwest, lived in villages, farmed maize, beans and squash, traded across the continent and fought and allied with one another.
Brave settlers crossed the ocean to build new lives and practise their faith freely; the Mayflower Compact of 1620 and colonial assemblies planted the seeds of self-government that became American democracy.
The colonists arrived as invaders in a continent of sovereign nations with their own politics, trade and diplomacy.
Slavery in America, from 1619 to 1865
The first recorded enslaved Africans arrive in English Virginia in 1619; by 1860 nearly four million people are held in bondage in the United States.
- Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America — Ira Berlin, Belknap Press of Harvard University Press (1998)
- Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database — SlaveVoyages Consortium
- Give Me Liberty! An American History — Eric Foner, W. W. Norton (2004)
- Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era — James M. McPherson, Oxford University Press (1988)
- The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story — Nikole Hannah-Jones (ed.), One World (2021)
Read more
- Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America — Ira Berlin, Belknap Press of Harvard University Press (1998)
- Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database — SlaveVoyages Consortium
- Give Me Liberty! An American History — Eric Foner, W. W. Norton (2004)
- Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era — James M. McPherson, Oxford University Press (1988)
- The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story — Nikole Hannah-Jones (ed.), One World (2021)
Slavery and the racial hierarchy built to justify it are the deepest wound in American life. Gaps in wealth, housing and policing, arguments over monuments and school curricula, and the very question of what the founding meant all run back to it. How to teach it is itself one of the sharpest fault lines in American politics.
In late August 1619 an English privateer, the White Lion, landed "20 and odd Negroes" at Point Comfort in Virginia. They had been seized from a Portuguese slave ship carrying captives from Angola.
Slavery is not a side-story but central to the American founding and economy.
Slavery was central, but the Revolution's ideals also became the weapon used against it.
Revolution & the early republic
1775 – 1828 The Revolution and the Constitution
Thirteen colonies break from Britain, declare that "all men are created equal", win a war of independence and write a Constitution that still governs the country.
- The Radicalism of the American Revolution — Gordon S. Wood, Alfred A. Knopf (1992)
- Give Me Liberty! An American History — Eric Foner, W. W. Norton (2004)
- Declaration of Independence: A Transcription — U.S. National Archives
- American Colonies: The Settling of North America — Alan Taylor, Viking Penguin (2001)
Read more
- The Radicalism of the American Revolution — Gordon S. Wood, Alfred A. Knopf (1992)
- Give Me Liberty! An American History — Eric Foner, W. W. Norton (2004)
- Declaration of Independence: A Transcription — U.S. National Archives
- American Colonies: The Settling of North America — Alan Taylor, Viking Penguin (2001)
The Revolution is the creation story Americans tell about themselves, and the Declaration and the Constitution are close to sacred texts. Today's fiercest arguments, over guns, abortion, free speech, the Electoral College and the powers of the president, are fought in the language of the founders and over what they "really meant".
After Britain's victory over France in 1763, Parliament tried to make the colonies pay for their defence and to slow settlement west of the Appalachians. Taxes like the Stamp Act (1765) and the tea tax met the cry "no taxation without representation", boycotts, and, in Boston in 1773, a "tea party" in the harbour.
Ordinary people rose against a distant monarchy and built the world's first large modern republic, based on popular sovereignty and written limits on power.
For enslaved people, women and Native nations, the new republic offered little.
Perhaps a fifth of white colonists stayed loyal to the Crown; tens of thousands left for Canada, Britain and the Caribbean, seeing the rebellion as mob rule by a self-interested elite.
Expansion & the slavery crisis
1829 – 1860 Westward expansion and the removal of Native peoples
The United States spreads to the Pacific, forcing Native nations from their homelands on the Trail of Tears and conquering the West, ending with the massacre at Wounded Knee.
- Unworthy Republic: The Dispossession of Native Americans and the Road to Indian Territory — Claudio Saunt, W. W. Norton (2020)
- Indigenous Continent: The Epic Contest for North America — Pekka Hämäläinen, Liveright (2022)
- American Indian Holocaust and Survival: A Population History since 1492 — Russell Thornton, University of Oklahoma Press (1987)
- The Lance and the Shield: The Life and Times of Sitting Bull — Robert M. Utley, Henry Holt (1993)
- Give Me Liberty! An American History — Eric Foner, W. W. Norton (2004)
Read more
- Unworthy Republic: The Dispossession of Native Americans and the Road to Indian Territory — Claudio Saunt, W. W. Norton (2020)
- Indigenous Continent: The Epic Contest for North America — Pekka Hämäläinen, Liveright (2022)
- American Indian Holocaust and Survival: A Population History since 1492 — Russell Thornton, University of Oklahoma Press (1987)
- The Lance and the Shield: The Life and Times of Sitting Bull — Robert M. Utley, Henry Holt (1993)
- Give Me Liberty! An American History — Eric Foner, W. W. Norton (2004)
The frontier gave Americans enduring myths of self-reliance, open space and the cowboy. For Native Americans it meant losing most of their land, and reservation poverty, broken treaties and fights over sovereignty, water and sacred sites remain live issues. Native people are not only history: tribal nations are governments with their own courts and laws.
In 1803 the Louisiana Purchase from France doubled the size of the country. Americans poured west, and many came to believe it was their "Manifest Destiny" to spread from sea to sea. Texas was annexed in 1845, Oregon secured in 1846, and the war with Mexico of 1846–48 added California and the Southwest.
Pioneers tamed a wilderness through courage and hard work, spreading farms, towns and democracy across the continent: the nation's "Manifest Destiny", in the 1845 phrase of journalist John O'Sullivan.
Expansion was a deliberate dispossession, carried out through coerced treaties, forced removal and war, in which the US government repeatedly broke its own promises.
Waves of immigration
Irish, Germans, then Italians, Jews, Poles and others, and after 1965 Latin Americans and Asians, remake the country, each wave meeting both welcome and backlash.
- Coming to America: A History of Immigration and Ethnicity in American Life — Roger Daniels, HarperCollins (1990)
- Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America — Mae M. Ngai, Princeton University Press (2004)
- Mexican Immigrants in the United States — Migration Policy Institute (2024)
Read more
- Coming to America: A History of Immigration and Ethnicity in American Life — Roger Daniels, HarperCollins (1990)
- Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America — Mae M. Ngai, Princeton University Press (2004)
- Mexican Immigrants in the United States — Migration Policy Institute (2024)
"A nation of immigrants" is a core American self-image, and most Americans can tell you where their family came from. Yet every generation has also fought over who belongs. Today about one in seven people in the country was born abroad, and immigration is among the most divisive political issues.
The first great wave came in the 1840s and 1850s, when Irish fleeing famine and Germans fleeing hard times and failed revolutions arrived in their millions. Their Catholicism provoked a nativist backlash, the "Know-Nothing" movement.
The war between Mexico and the United States
The United States invades Mexico, occupies its capital and takes about half its territory, from Texas to California, in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo.
- A Wicked War: Polk, Clay, Lincoln, and the 1846 U.S. Invasion of Mexico — Amy S. Greenberg, Alfred A. Knopf (2012)
- México frente a Estados Unidos: un ensayo histórico, 1776–2000 — Josefina Zoraida Vázquez and Lorenzo Meyer, Fondo de Cultura Económica (2001)
- War of a Thousand Deserts: Indian Raids and the U.S.-Mexican War — Brian DeLay, Yale University Press (2008)
- The Course of Mexican History — Michael C. Meyer, William L. Sherman and Susan M. Deeds, Oxford University Press (2014)
- Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant — Ulysses S. Grant, Charles L. Webster & Company (1885)
Read more
- A Wicked War: Polk, Clay, Lincoln, and the 1846 U.S. Invasion of Mexico — Amy S. Greenberg, Alfred A. Knopf (2012)
- México frente a Estados Unidos: un ensayo histórico, 1776–2000 — Josefina Zoraida Vázquez and Lorenzo Meyer, Fondo de Cultura Económica (2001)
- War of a Thousand Deserts: Indian Raids and the U.S.-Mexican War — Brian DeLay, Yale University Press (2008)
- The Course of Mexican History — Michael C. Meyer, William L. Sherman and Susan M. Deeds, Oxford University Press (2014)
- Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant — Ulysses S. Grant, Charles L. Webster & Company (1885)
Most Americans know little about this war, though it gave the country California, Texas and the Southwest. Its conquests reopened the fight over whether slavery could spread west, helping cause the Civil War, and they made the Mexican American story part of the American story from the start.
When Mexico won independence in 1821 its northern frontier, from Texas to California, was vast and thinly settled. To fill Texas, Mexico invited American colonists, who soon outnumbered Mexican tejanos, brought enslaved people despite Mexico's abolition of slavery in 1829, and resisted central control.
An unjust war of conquest by an expansionist neighbour that provoked a fight in disputed territory to seize land it had already tried to buy.
President James K.
Many Americans opposed the war at the time, including the young congressman Abraham Lincoln, who challenged Polk to identify the "spot" where blood had been shed. Ulysses S.
Civil War & Reconstruction
1861 – 1877 The Civil War
Eleven Southern states secede to protect slavery; four years of war kill an estimated 620,000–750,000 people, preserve the Union and end slavery.
- Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era — James M. McPherson, Oxford University Press (1988)
- A Census-Based Count of the Civil War Dead — J. David Hacker, Civil War History (2011)
- The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery — Eric Foner, W. W. Norton (2010)
- Give Me Liberty! An American History — Eric Foner, W. W. Norton (2004)
Read more
- Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era — James M. McPherson, Oxford University Press (1988)
- A Census-Based Count of the Civil War Dead — J. David Hacker, Civil War History (2011)
- The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery — Eric Foner, W. W. Norton (2010)
- Give Me Liberty! An American History — Eric Foner, W. W. Norton (2004)
The Civil War remains the moral centre of American history. Arguments over Confederate flags and statues, "states' rights", and the political map itself (the old Confederacy is now the Republican heartland, once Democratic) trace back to it. For Black Americans it is the war that brought freedom, at a terrible price, but not equality.
By 1860 the country was split between a free-labour North and a South whose economy and social order rested on nearly four million enslaved people. The question that tore it apart was whether slavery could spread into the western territories.
The South seceded to protect slavery, as the secession declarations themselves say.
A view built by ex-Confederates after 1865 and long dominant in Southern memory and textbooks: the war was about states' rights and honour, not slavery, and Confederate leaders were noble men overwhelmed by Northern numbers.
Reconstruction and Jim Crow
Freed people gain citizenship and the vote, then lose most of it as white Southern rule returns through terror and segregation laws.
- Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 — Eric Foner, Harper & Row (1988)
- Give Me Liberty! An American History — Eric Foner, W. W. Norton (2004)
- The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration — Isabel Wilkerson, Random House (2010)
Read more
- Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 — Eric Foner, Harper & Row (1988)
- Give Me Liberty! An American History — Eric Foner, W. W. Norton (2004)
- The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration — Isabel Wilkerson, Random House (2010)
The Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments of this era, promising equal protection and the vote, are the legal basis of modern civil rights, and fights over voting rules still echo the period. Many Black Americans see Reconstruction as a promise made and broken, and its collapse explains why the civil rights movement was needed a century later.
After the war, Congress passed the Fourteenth Amendment (1868), making everyone born in the country a citizen with "equal protection of the laws", and the Fifteenth (1870), barring racial discrimination in voting. Under federal protection, Black men voted and held office across the South; some 2,000 served in public office, including the first Black senators.
Industry, immigration & Jim Crow
1878 – 1928 The Philippine–American War
The United States fights the new Philippine Republic to take control of the islands; the war kills over 4,200 American and some 20,000 Filipino soldiers, and as many as 200,000 Filipino civilians die from violence, famine and disease.
- The Philippine-American War, 1899–1902 — Office of the Historian, U.S. Department of State
- The Philippine War, 1899–1902 — Brian McAllister Linn, University Press of Kansas (2000)
- The Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States, and the Philippines — Paul A. Kramer, University of North Carolina Press (2006)
- In Our Image: America's Empire in the Philippines — Stanley Karnow, Random House (1989)
- History of the Filipino People — Teodoro A. Agoncillo, Garotech (1990)
- The Philippines: A Past Revisited — Renato Constantino, Tala Publishing (1975)
Read more
- The Philippine-American War, 1899–1902 — Office of the Historian, U.S. Department of State
- The Philippine War, 1899–1902 — Brian McAllister Linn, University Press of Kansas (2000)
- The Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States, and the Philippines — Paul A. Kramer, University of North Carolina Press (2006)
- In Our Image: America's Empire in the Philippines — Stanley Karnow, Random House (1989)
- History of the Filipino People — Teodoro A. Agoncillo, Garotech (1990)
- The Philippines: A Past Revisited — Renato Constantino, Tala Publishing (1975)
It was America's first major overseas colonial war, with a counter-insurgency, torture ("water cure") and reprisals that anticipated later wars. It is little remembered in the United States today.
On the night of 4 February 1899, an American sentry fired on Filipino soldiers in Manila and fighting broke out along the lines around the city. Two days later the US Senate narrowly ratified the Treaty of Paris annexing the islands. The young republic, which had expected recognition, found itself at war with the United States.
It was a war of conquest against a sovereign republic that had already won its independence from Spain.
President McKinley described US policy as "benevolent assimilation": the Filipinos were not ready for self-government, and the United States would educate and uplift them.
Historians now treat it as a full war of colonial conquest, marked by racialised violence on the American side.
Depression & world war
1929 – 1945 Migration north: repatriation, braceros and the border
Across the twentieth century Mexican workers are invited, expelled and invited again by the United States, building a Mexican American population of tens of millions and a border that both unites and divides.
- Decade of Betrayal: Mexican Repatriation in the 1930s — Francisco E. Balderrama and Raymond Rodríguez, University of New Mexico Press (2006)
- Braceros: Migrant Citizens and Transnational Subjects in the Postwar United States and Mexico — Deborah Cohen, University of North Carolina Press (2011)
- Line in the Sand: A History of the Western U.S.-Mexico Border — Rachel St. John, Princeton University Press (2011)
- Mexican Immigrants in the United States — Migration Policy Institute (2024)
- Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America — Mae M. Ngai, Princeton University Press (2004)
- Ingresos por remesas (balance of payments statistics) — Banco de México (2025)
- Facts on Hispanics of Mexican origin in the United States, 2021 — Pew Research Center (2023)
Read more
- Decade of Betrayal: Mexican Repatriation in the 1930s — Francisco E. Balderrama and Raymond Rodríguez, University of New Mexico Press (2006)
- Braceros: Migrant Citizens and Transnational Subjects in the Postwar United States and Mexico — Deborah Cohen, University of North Carolina Press (2011)
- Line in the Sand: A History of the Western U.S.-Mexico Border — Rachel St. John, Princeton University Press (2011)
- Mexican Immigrants in the United States — Migration Policy Institute (2024)
- Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America — Mae M. Ngai, Princeton University Press (2004)
- Ingresos por remesas (balance of payments statistics) — Banco de México (2025)
- Facts on Hispanics of Mexican origin in the United States, 2021 — Pew Research Center (2023)
About 37 million people of Mexican origin live in the United States, making Mexican Americans one of the country's largest communities, especially in the Southwest, where many families predate the border itself. The border and immigration are among the most heated issues in American politics.
For decades after 1848, the border was little more than a line on a map, and people crossed freely to work in mines, railways and fields. The Revolution sent hundreds of thousands north.
Mexican labour built much of the American Southwest's farms, railways and cities, yet the United States has repeatedly welcomed the workers and then scapegoated and deported them when times turned hard, sometimes even its own citizens of Mexican descent.
A sovereign nation must control its borders; large-scale unauthorised immigration undercuts wages, strains public services and undermines the rule of law, and legal immigration should be orderly and chosen by Americans.
The Great Depression and the New Deal
The stock market crash opens a decade of mass unemployment; Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal builds a welfare state and redraws American politics.
- Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929–1945 — David M. Kennedy, Oxford University Press (1999)
- Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, 1932–1940 — William E. Leuchtenburg, Harper & Row (1963)
- Decade of Betrayal: Mexican Repatriation in the 1930s — Francisco E. Balderrama and Raymond Rodríguez, University of New Mexico Press (2006)
Read more
- Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929–1945 — David M. Kennedy, Oxford University Press (1999)
- Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, 1932–1940 — William E. Leuchtenburg, Harper & Row (1963)
- Decade of Betrayal: Mexican Repatriation in the 1930s — Francisco E. Balderrama and Raymond Rodríguez, University of New Mexico Press (2006)
The New Deal created Social Security, bank deposit insurance and the idea that Washington is responsible for the economy. The argument it began, how big government should be, is still the basic divide between Democrats and Republicans. Grandparents' Depression habits, saving string and never wasting food, live on in family memory.
The Wall Street crash of October 1929 set off the worst economic collapse in modern history. By 1933 about a quarter of the workforce was unemployed, thousands of banks had failed, and drought turned the southern Plains into the "Dust Bowl", driving families west to California. Shanty towns of the homeless were nicknamed "Hoovervilles" after President Herbert Hoover.
Roosevelt's experiments relieved suffering, restored faith in democracy when much of the world turned to dictatorship, and built a safety net that lifted millions of old people out of poverty.
Conservatives argued the New Deal expanded federal power far beyond the Constitution's design and failed to end the Depression, which lasted until wartime spending.
The Second World War and the rise of a superpower
After Pearl Harbor the United States enters the war, mobilises its vast economy, helps defeat Germany and Japan, drops the atomic bomb, and emerges as the world's leading power.
- Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929–1945 — David M. Kennedy, Oxford University Press (1999)
- Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945–1974 — James T. Patterson, Oxford University Press (1996)
- United States — Encyclopaedia Britannica
Read more
- Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929–1945 — David M. Kennedy, Oxford University Press (1999)
- Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945–1974 — James T. Patterson, Oxford University Press (1996)
- United States — Encyclopaedia Britannica
For many Americans this is "the good war" fought by "the Greatest Generation", the moment their country saved the world from fascism. It made the United States a global superpower with bases, alliances and a sense of world leadership that Americans still argue about. The atomic bombings and the internment of Japanese Americans are its unresolved shadows.
Americans were deeply reluctant to enter another European war, but Japan's surprise attack on the naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, on 7 December 1941, killing about 2,400 Americans, united the country overnight. Germany declared war days later. American factories turned out ships, tanks and aircraft at an astonishing rate, and some 16 million Americans served in uniform.
Many Americans, especially of the war generation, believe the atomic bombs ended the war quickly and saved the lives of the huge numbers of soldiers and civilians an invasion of Japan would have cost.
Survivors in Japan and many critics elsewhere see the destruction of two cities and the killing of well over 100,000 civilians as unjustified; some historians argue Japan was close to surrender.
Cold War & civil rights
1946 – 1991 The Korean War
North Korea invades the South; American-led UN forces and then Chinese armies join a war that kills millions, devastates the peninsula and ends in an armistice but no peace.
- The Korean War: A History — Bruce Cumings, Modern Library (2010)
- Rethinking the Korean War: A New Diplomatic and Strategic History — William Stueck, Princeton University Press (2002)
- China's Road to the Korean War: The Making of the Sino-American Confrontation — Chen Jian, Columbia University Press (1994)
- Korean War — Encyclopaedia Britannica, Encyclopaedia Britannica
- The Two Koreas: A Contemporary History — Don Oberdorfer and Robert Carlin, Basic Books (2014)
Read more
- The Korean War: A History — Bruce Cumings, Modern Library (2010)
- Rethinking the Korean War: A New Diplomatic and Strategic History — William Stueck, Princeton University Press (2002)
- China's Road to the Korean War: The Making of the Sino-American Confrontation — Chen Jian, Columbia University Press (1994)
- Korean War — Encyclopaedia Britannica, Encyclopaedia Britannica
- The Two Koreas: A Contemporary History — Don Oberdorfer and Robert Carlin, Basic Books (2014)
Often called "the Forgotten War", Korea was the first hot war of the Cold War and cost about 36,000 American lives. It turned the US into a permanent military power in Asia: some 28,000 US troops are still stationed in South Korea.
Before dawn on 25 June 1950, North Korean forces crossed the 38th parallel in strength. Kim Il-sung had pressed Stalin for months for permission to unify the country by force, and Stalin agreed, on condition that Mao would back him. Seoul fell in three days.
25", the day the North launched an unprovoked invasion.
The "Fatherland Liberation War", which the regime says began with an American and South Korean attack and ended in victory under Kim Il-sung.
A necessary stand against communist aggression and the first test of the UN, which saved South Korea at great cost.
A defensive intervention to protect China's border and an ally after UN forces crossed the 38th parallel and approached the Yalu River, fought by "people's volunteers" who stopped the world's strongest army.
The civil rights movement
Black Americans, organised through churches, students and lawyers, overturn legal segregation and win the vote through nonviolent protest at enormous personal risk.
- Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954–63 — Taylor Branch, Simon & Schuster (1988)
- Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945–1974 — James T. Patterson, Oxford University Press (1996)
- America Divided: The Civil War of the 1960s — Maurice Isserman and Michael Kazin, Oxford University Press (2000)
- I Have a Dream (address at the March on Washington, 28 August 1963) — Martin Luther King Jr. Research and Education Institute, Stanford University (1963)
Read more
- Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954–63 — Taylor Branch, Simon & Schuster (1988)
- Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945–1974 — James T. Patterson, Oxford University Press (1996)
- America Divided: The Civil War of the 1960s — Maurice Isserman and Michael Kazin, Oxford University Press (2000)
- I Have a Dream (address at the March on Washington, 28 August 1963) — Martin Luther King Jr. Research and Education Institute, Stanford University (1963)
The movement is the closest thing modern America has to a shared moral story: Martin Luther King Jr. has a national holiday, and its methods inspire protest movements of every kind. But Americans disagree sharply over whether its work is finished, from voting rules to policing, as the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020 showed.
By the 1950s, segregation was the law across the South and a fact of life in much of the North. Black Southerners were kept from voting by poll taxes, rigged literacy tests and violence; the 1955 murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till in Mississippi, and his mother's decision to hold an open-casket funeral, shocked the nation.
Many Americans, especially conservatives, see the movement as having won its central aims, legal equality and the vote, and believe the country should now be "colour-blind", as they read King's dream of a nation judging people by "the content of their character".
Many Black Americans and progressives stress that King also campaigned against poverty and the Vietnam War, was deeply unpopular in his lifetime, and that big gaps in wealth, schooling, health and treatment by police show the struggle continues.
The movement was a religious revival as much as a political campaign, rooted in the Exodus story and the conviction that every person is made in God's image.
The Vietnam War
A long war to stop communism in Vietnam costs about 58,000 American and millions of Vietnamese lives, splits the country and ends in defeat.
- America's Longest War: The United States and Vietnam, 1950–1975 — George C. Herring, McGraw-Hill (1979)
- Vietnam War U.S. Military Fatal Casualty Statistics — U.S. National Archives
- America Divided: The Civil War of the 1960s — Maurice Isserman and Michael Kazin, Oxford University Press (2000)
- Hanoi's War: An International History of the War for Peace in Vietnam — Lien-Hang T. Nguyen, University of North Carolina Press (2012)
- Vietnamese Casualties During the American War: A New Estimate — Charles Hirschman, Samuel Preston and Vu Manh Loi, Population and Development Review (1995)
- Vietnam: A New History — Christopher Goscha, Basic Books (2016)
Read more
- America's Longest War: The United States and Vietnam, 1950–1975 — George C. Herring, McGraw-Hill (1979)
- Vietnam War U.S. Military Fatal Casualty Statistics — U.S. National Archives
- America Divided: The Civil War of the 1960s — Maurice Isserman and Michael Kazin, Oxford University Press (2000)
- Hanoi's War: An International History of the War for Peace in Vietnam — Lien-Hang T. Nguyen, University of North Carolina Press (2012)
- Vietnamese Casualties During the American War: A New Estimate — Charles Hirschman, Samuel Preston and Vu Manh Loi, Population and Development Review (1995)
- Vietnam: A New History — Christopher Goscha, Basic Books (2016)
Vietnam broke many Americans' trust in their government and taught a generation to be wary of foreign wars; "another Vietnam" was invoked over Iraq and Afghanistan. The gap between those who served and those who protested shaped baby-boomer politics, and the respect now shown to veterans partly reflects regret at how Vietnam veterans were treated.
The United States backed France and then South Vietnam against the communist-led North from the 1950s. After a disputed naval clash in the Gulf of Tonkin in 1964, President Lyndon Johnson escalated; by 1968 over half a million US troops were there, many of them young draftees.
Many veterans and conservatives see the war as a defence of South Vietnam against communist aggression, lost because politicians tied the military's hands and the public lost its will.
Most historians and the antiwar movement see it as a misreading of a nationalist and anti-colonial struggle as a Cold War contest, pursued long after leaders privately doubted it could be won, as the Pentagon Papers revealed.
A war of national liberation against American imperialism and its "puppet" regime in Saigon, continuing the struggle against France.
A war to defend the Republic of Vietnam, a flawed but real state with its own soldiers, elections and civil society, against conquest by the communist North backed by the USSR and China.
Recent scholarship, drawing on Vietnamese archives, stresses that the war was a civil war among Vietnamese as well as an anti-colonial and Cold War conflict.
Lone superpower, divided nation
1992 – today NAFTA and the Zapatista uprising
On the day the North American Free Trade Agreement takes effect, masked Indigenous rebels of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation seize towns in Chiapas.
- The Chiapas Rebellion: The Struggle for Land and Democracy — Neil Harvey, Duke University Press (1998)
- NAFTA Revisited: Achievements and Challenges — Gary Clyde Hufbauer and Jeffrey J. Schott, Peterson Institute for International Economics (2005)
- Opening Mexico: The Making of a Democracy — Julia Preston and Samuel Dillon, Farrar, Straus and Giroux (2004)
Read more
- The Chiapas Rebellion: The Struggle for Land and Democracy — Neil Harvey, Duke University Press (1998)
- NAFTA Revisited: Achievements and Challenges — Gary Clyde Hufbauer and Jeffrey J. Schott, Peterson Institute for International Economics (2005)
- Opening Mexico: The Making of a Democracy — Julia Preston and Samuel Dillon, Farrar, Straus and Giroux (2004)
NAFTA became a symbol in American politics of lost factory jobs, attacked by both Donald Trump and many Democrats; it was replaced by the USMCA in 2020. Yet North American supply chains it created are woven deep into US industry.
President Carlos Salinas de Gortari staked his presidency on NAFTA, linking Mexico with the United States and Canada.
NAFTA modernised the economy, attracted investment, built a powerful export industry in the north and centre, and helped create a larger middle class.
Opening to subsidised US corn ruined small farmers, the 1992 reform ending land redistribution betrayed Zapata's legacy, and growth bypassed the Indigenous south.
9/11 and the wars that followed
Al-Qaeda hijackers kill nearly 3,000 people in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania, and the United States launches two decades of war in Afghanistan and Iraq that reshape how Muslims are seen and treated.
- The 9/11 Commission Report — National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States (2004)
- Costs of War: Human Costs of the Post-9/11 Wars — Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, Brown University (2023)
- September 11 attacks — Encyclopaedia Britannica
- Islam: The Straight Path — John L. Esposito, Oxford University Press
- U.S. Muslims Concerned About Their Place in Society, but Continue to Believe in the American Dream — Pew Research Center (2017)
- The World's Muslims: Religion, Politics and Society — Pew Research Center (2013)
- Misquoting Muhammad: The Challenge and Choices of Interpreting the Prophet's Legacy — Jonathan A. C. Brown, Oneworld (2014)
- The Qur'an: A New Translation — M. A. S. Abdel Haleem (trans.), Oxford University Press (Oxford World's Classics) (2004)
- The Arabs: A History — Eugene Rogan, Basic Books (2009)
- Covering Islam: How the Media and the Experts Determine How We See the Rest of the World — Edward W. Said, Pantheon (1981)
- Jihad in Saudi Arabia: Violence and Pan-Islamism since 1979 — Thomas Hegghammer, Cambridge University Press (2010)
- A History of Saudi Arabia (2nd edition) — Madawi Al-Rasheed, Cambridge University Press (2010)
Read more
- The 9/11 Commission Report — National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States (2004)
- Costs of War: Human Costs of the Post-9/11 Wars — Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, Brown University (2023)
- September 11 attacks — Encyclopaedia Britannica
- Islam: The Straight Path — John L. Esposito, Oxford University Press
- U.S. Muslims Concerned About Their Place in Society, but Continue to Believe in the American Dream — Pew Research Center (2017)
- The World's Muslims: Religion, Politics and Society — Pew Research Center (2013)
- Misquoting Muhammad: The Challenge and Choices of Interpreting the Prophet's Legacy — Jonathan A. C. Brown, Oneworld (2014)
- The Qur'an: A New Translation — M. A. S. Abdel Haleem (trans.), Oxford University Press (Oxford World's Classics) (2004)
- The Arabs: A History — Eugene Rogan, Basic Books (2009)
- Covering Islam: How the Media and the Experts Determine How We See the Rest of the World — Edward W. Said, Pantheon (1981)
- Jihad in Saudi Arabia: Violence and Pan-Islamism since 1979 — Thomas Hegghammer, Cambridge University Press (2010)
- A History of Saudi Arabia (2nd edition) — Madawi Al-Rasheed, Cambridge University Press (2010)
For Americans over about thirty, 9/11 is a "where were you" moment, a shared trauma that brought a brief, fierce unity. It reshaped everyday life (airport security, surveillance) and foreign policy, and the long, costly wars that followed left many Americans, on left and right, sceptical of foreign intervention.
On the morning of 11 September 2001, nineteen al-Qaeda hijackers seized four airliners. Two destroyed the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York, one hit the Pentagon outside Washington, and the fourth, United 93, crashed in a Pennsylvania field after passengers fought back.
The attacks demanded a global fight against jihadist terrorism; removing the Taliban and pursuing al-Qaeda prevented further mass-casualty attacks on American soil, and Osama bin Laden was finally killed in 2011.
The Iraq War was launched on false claims about weapons of mass destruction, torture and mass surveillance betrayed American values, and the wars killed hundreds of thousands of people and ended with the Taliban back in power in 2021.
The attacks were a crime that violated Islam's teaching on the sanctity of innocent life.
The attacks were a crime against Islam and against Saudi Arabia, carried out by an organisation that had already declared war on the kingdom and whose leader had been stripped of his citizenship in 1994.
The drug war
President Felipe Calderón sends the army against drug cartels; violence explodes, and in the years since, hundreds of thousands of Mexicans have been murdered and more than 100,000 remain missing.
- El Narco: Inside Mexico's Criminal Insurgency — Ioan Grillo, Bloomsbury (2011)
- Defunciones por homicidio (annual statistics) — INEGI (Instituto Nacional de Estadística y Geografía) (2025)
- Registro Nacional de Personas Desaparecidas y No Localizadas — Comisión Nacional de Búsqueda de Personas, Gobierno de México (2026)
- Mexico — Encyclopaedia Britannica
Read more
- El Narco: Inside Mexico's Criminal Insurgency — Ioan Grillo, Bloomsbury (2011)
- Defunciones por homicidio (annual statistics) — INEGI (Instituto Nacional de Estadística y Geografía) (2025)
- Registro Nacional de Personas Desaparecidas y No Localizadas — Comisión Nacional de Búsqueda de Personas, Gobierno de México (2026)
- Mexico — Encyclopaedia Britannica
Fentanyl and other drugs trafficked through Mexico are tied to tens of thousands of overdose deaths a year in the United States, and the cartels have become a central issue in US politics, with some Americans calling for military action in Mexico, which Mexicans see as a threat to their sovereignty.
Mexican smugglers had moved marijuana and heroin north for decades, often under arrangements with local authorities. In the 1990s, as US enforcement closed Caribbean routes, Mexican organisations took over much of the cocaine trade from Colombia, and the end of one-party rule in 2000 broke many of the old understandings between politicians and traffickers.
Sending soldiers against cartels and killing or capturing their leaders splintered the groups into rival factions and multiplied violence, while corruption let many officials work with the criminals.
Calderón argued the state had to retake territory cartels already controlled. López Obrador promised "hugs, not bullets" and social programmes, yet relied even more on the military-led National Guard.
Mexican cartels are violent criminal organisations poisoning Americans; the US has funded Mexican security forces since the 2008 Mérida Initiative and in 2025 designated several cartels as foreign terrorist organisations.
Barack Obama elected president
The son of a Kenyan father and a white Kansan mother becomes the first Black president, two centuries after the Constitution counted enslaved people as three-fifths of a person.
- Barack Obama — Encyclopaedia Britannica
- As Partisan Hostility Grows, Signs of Frustration With the Two-Party System — Pew Research Center (2022)
Read more
- Barack Obama — Encyclopaedia Britannica
- As Partisan Hostility Grows, Signs of Frustration With the Two-Party System — Pew Research Center (2022)
Obama's election was a moment of joy and tears for many Americans, especially Black Americans who never expected to see it. Some hoped it meant a "post-racial" America; instead, the reaction to his presidency, from the Tea Party to the "birther" conspiracy theory, became part of the story of today's polarisation.
Barack Obama, a first-term senator from Illinois born in Hawaii in 1961, won the 2008 election amid the worst financial crisis since the Depression, with a campaign of "hope" and "Yes we can". On election night crowds wept in Chicago's Grant Park and in Black churches across the country.
For many, his victory showed that the American promise could be fulfilled within a lifetime of Jim Crow, and his health reform, the Affordable Care Act (2010), extended insurance to millions.
Conservatives saw his health law and stimulus as government overreach and mobilised in the Tea Party movement; some on the left felt he was too cautious on Wall Street, war and immigration, deporting record numbers of people.
A divided country: red and blue America
Partisan identity hardens into something like tribal belonging, as Americans sort into "red" and "blue" worlds that disagree not just on policy but on facts and on the meaning of the nation.
- As Partisan Hostility Grows, Signs of Frustration With the Two-Party System — Pew Research Center (2022)
- American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America — Colin Woodard, Viking (2011)
- United States — Encyclopaedia Britannica
Read more
- As Partisan Hostility Grows, Signs of Frustration With the Two-Party System — Pew Research Center (2022)
- American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America — Colin Woodard, Viking (2011)
- United States — Encyclopaedia Britannica
Politics now shapes where many Americans live, what news they trust, and even whom they will date. Most do not hate their neighbours, but many fear what the other side would do with power. Knowing this is key to talking with Americans: ordinary topics can carry a political charge.
American politics has always been rough, but since the 1990s the two parties have sorted along lines of geography, religion, education and race.
Elites in cities, universities, media and government look down on ordinary people, faith and patriotism; immigration has been out of control; and the country's founding is being taught as something shameful.
The country must face its history of racism and inequality; rights over abortion, voting and LGBTQ equality are under threat; and the refusal to accept the 2020 election result, culminating in the attack on the Capitol on 6 January 2021, endangered democracy itself.
Core values & worldview
If you want to understand an American, start with the idea that the country was founded on a promise rather than a bloodline. The Declaration of Independence said that “all men are created equal”, and for 250 years Americans have argued about what that means and who it includes.
- The Radicalism of the American Revolution — Gordon S. Wood, Alfred A. Knopf (1992)
- Declaration of Independence: A Transcription — U.S. National Archives
- Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom — David W. Blight, Simon & Schuster (2018)
- Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954–63 — Taylor Branch, Simon & Schuster (1988)
A few threads run through American life, though Americans weigh them very differently.
Liberty and suspicion of power. A country born in a revolt against a king tends to distrust government. Many Americans, especially conservatives, see federal power, taxes and regulation as threats to freedom; the right to bear arms, written into the Second Amendment in 1791, is defended by many as the ultimate guarantee against tyranny. Progressives tend to see government as a tool for protecting rights and fairness, as in the New Deal and civil rights laws. Both sides talk about freedom; they mean different things.
- Give Me Liberty! An American History — Eric Foner, W. W. Norton (2004)
- Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, 1932–1940 — William E. Leuchtenburg, Harper & Row (1963)
Self-reliance and the American Dream. The belief that hard work brings success, and that each generation should do better than the last, is deeply rooted, and it draws immigrants still. Americans tend to be optimistic, practical and ready to reinvent themselves, and they are less likely than Europeans to blame failure on circumstance. Critics point out that social mobility is now lower than many Americans assume.
- Give Me Liberty! An American History — Eric Foner, W. W. Norton (2004)
- Coming to America: A History of Immigration and Ethnicity in American Life — Roger Daniels, HarperCollins (1990)
Friendliness and informality. Americans are often warm and open with strangers, quick to use first names and make small talk, which can seem superficial to outsiders but is meant sincerely. Volunteering, charity and community groups, from churches to Little League, are a big part of life.
- American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America — Colin Woodard, Viking (2011)
Faith, still. The United States is more religious than most rich countries. In Pew’s 2023–24 Religious Landscape Study, 62% of adults called themselves Christian (40% Protestant, 19% Catholic), down from 78% in 2007, while 29% had no religion, a share that has levelled off since 2019.
- Religious Landscape Study: Executive Summary — Pew Research Center (2025)
Daily life & customs
Daily life is shaped by space and cars. Outside the older cities, most Americans live in suburbs and drive everywhere; long commutes, big supermarkets and drive-throughs are normal. People move house and state more often than in most countries, so many live far from where they grew up.
- United States — Encyclopaedia Britannica
The calendar is marked by civic as much as religious holidays: Independence Day on 4 July, with fireworks and barbecues; Thanksgiving in late November, the great family gathering; Memorial Day and Veterans Day for the military; Martin Luther King Jr. Day in January; and Christmas, celebrated by Christians and many non-Christians alike. Halloween is a big, mostly secular event for children. Many Americans fly the flag at home and children often recite the Pledge of Allegiance at school.
- Give Me Liberty! An American History — Eric Foner, W. W. Norton (2004)
Sport is a shared language: American football, from high-school games to the Super Bowl; baseball, the old “national pastime”; basketball, born in Massachusetts and now global. College sports inspire loyalty that can outlast any job.
- United States — Encyclopaedia Britannica
Food reflects immigration: pizza, tacos, bagels, Chinese takeaway and Southern soul food are as American as hamburgers. Regional dishes, Texas barbecue, New England clam chowder, Louisiana gumbo, are points of local pride.
Guns are part of daily life for a large minority. A 2023 Pew survey found 32% of adults personally own a gun and about 40% live in a household with one, mostly citing protection.
- For Most U.S. Gun Owners, Protection Is the Main Reason They Own a Gun — Pew Research Center (2023)
- Estimating Global Civilian-Held Firearms Numbers — Aaron Karp, Small Arms Survey (2018)
Wounds & sensitivities
Slavery and race. The legacy of slavery, Jim Crow segregation and lynching is the deepest wound in American life. Black Americans may carry family memories of the segregated South or the Great Migration north; wealth, health and policing gaps remain stark, and the police murder of George Floyd in 2020 brought millions into the streets.
- Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 — Eric Foner, Harper & Row (1988)
- The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration — Isabel Wilkerson, Random House (2010)
- Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954–63 — Taylor Branch, Simon & Schuster (1988)
Native dispossession. For Native Americans, the founding story is one of invasion, broken treaties, removal and boarding schools that tried to erase their cultures. Thanksgiving and Columbus Day are painful for many, and some communities mark a National Day of Mourning or Indigenous Peoples’ Day instead.
- Unworthy Republic: The Dispossession of Native Americans and the Road to Indian Territory — Claudio Saunt, W. W. Norton (2020)
- American Indian Holocaust and Survival: A Population History since 1492 — Russell Thornton, University of Oklahoma Press (1987)
9/11. The attacks of 11 September 2001 killed 2,977 people and remain raw, especially in New York. Jokes about them are unwelcome; for many, so are casual comparisons.
- The 9/11 Commission Report — National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States (2004)
Gun violence. Almost 47,000 Americans died from gunshot injuries in 2023, more than half of them suicides; school shootings such as Sandy Hook (2012) and Uvalde (2022) traumatised the nation. Debate is bitter: for some the answer is stricter laws, for others the right to defend oneself.
- What the data says about gun deaths in the U.S. — Pew Research Center (2025)
- For Most U.S. Gun Owners, Protection Is the Main Reason They Own a Gun — Pew Research Center (2023)
Wars and veterans. Military service is deeply respected, and many families have lost someone in Vietnam, Iraq or Afghanistan. People can criticise a war, but criticising those who fought it lands badly.
- America's Longest War: The United States and Vietnam, 1950–1975 — George C. Herring, McGraw-Hill (1979)
- Costs of War: Human Costs of the Post-9/11 Wars — Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, Brown University (2023)
Being lectured. Americans know the world watches them. They can be touchy about foreigners who mock them as ignorant, fat or gun-crazy, especially since many share those criticisms of their own country.
Modern attitudes
Polarisation. The defining feature of American politics now is division between red and blue, which runs along lines of geography, education, religion and race. Pew found that in 2022 62% of Republicans and 54% of Democrats had a very unfavourable view of the other party, up from 43% and 46% a decade earlier.
- As Partisan Hostility Grows, Signs of Frustration With the Two-Party System — Pew Research Center (2022)
Contested framings. Even history is partisan. Is America fundamentally good, its sins the exception, or was injustice built into its foundation? The 1619 Project and the conservative reaction to it, battles over school curricula and the term “woke” all turn on this question.
- The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story — Nikole Hannah-Jones (ed.), One World (2021)
- Letter from five historians on The 1619 Project, with the editor's response — Victoria Bynum, James M. McPherson, James Oakes, Sean Wilentz and Gordon S. Wood; Jake Silverstein, The New York Times Magazine (2019)
Diversity. The country is becoming more diverse: in the 2020 census, Hispanic or Latino Americans made up about 19% of the population, and the share of people identifying with more than one race rose sharply. Many younger Americans grew up in a multiracial America that older Americans did not.
- Improved Race and Ethnicity Measures Reveal U.S. Population Is Much More Multiracial — U.S. Census Bureau (2021)
Shared ground. Under the noise, majorities agree on more than one might think: love of country, pride in the military, belief in hard work, and frustration with politicians. In 2022 about a quarter of Americans viewed both parties unfavourably.
- As Partisan Hostility Grows, Signs of Frustration With the Two-Party System — Pew Research Center (2022)
Not all Americans are the same
Regions. The United States is less one country than several. Colin Woodard argues its regional cultures go back to colonial settlement: Puritan New England, the Quaker-influenced Mid-Atlantic, the plantation Deep South, the Scots-Irish Appalachian backcountry, the Hispanic Southwest.
- American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America — Colin Woodard, Viking (2011)
City and country. Big-city Americans tend to be more liberal, secular and diverse; small-town and rural Americans more conservative, churchgoing and rooted. Each often feels misunderstood, or looked down on, by the other.
- As Partisan Hostility Grows, Signs of Frustration With the Two-Party System — Pew Research Center (2022)
- American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America — Colin Woodard, Viking (2011)
Race and ancestry. Black Americans, many descended from enslaved people, have their own deep history and culture, from spirituals to hip hop. About 62 million Hispanic or Latino Americans, most of Mexican origin, range from families in New Mexico who predate the border to recent arrivals. Asian Americans, Native Americans, Arab Americans and others each have distinct stories, and white Americans are themselves Irish, Italian, German, Polish, Jewish and more.
- Improved Race and Ethnicity Measures Reveal U.S. Population Is Much More Multiracial — U.S. Census Bureau (2021)
- Facts on Hispanics of Mexican origin in the United States, 2021 — Pew Research Center (2023)
- American Indian Holocaust and Survival: A Population History since 1492 — Russell Thornton, University of Oklahoma Press (1987)
Faith. An evangelical in rural Alabama, a Catholic in Boston, a Jewish New Yorker, a Muslim in Dearborn, a Mormon in Utah and a secular Californian live in very different religious worlds.
- Religious Landscape Study: Executive Summary — Pew Research Center (2025)
Generations. Baby boomers remember the Cold War and Vietnam; millennials and Generation Z came of age with 9/11, the 2008 crash, smartphones and student debt, and many doubt they will be better off than their parents.
Meeting someone
Conversation starters
- Where they’re from. Ask about their state or hometown; most Americans have strong opinions about their region, its food and its sports teams.
- American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America — Colin Woodard, Viking (2011)
- Family roots. Many love to talk about where their ancestors came from, whether Ireland, Italy, Mexico or West Africa, and about family road trips and national parks.
- Coming to America: A History of Immigration and Ethnicity in American Life — Roger Daniels, HarperCollins (1990)
- Sport, film, TV and music. The Super Bowl, the latest series, or the music of their hometown are safe and friendly ground.
- Food. Ask about the best barbecue, pizza or tacos where they live; you will get an opinion.
Topics to approach carefully
- Politics. Don’t assume someone’s views from where they live or what they look like, and don’t open with Trump. Many Americans avoid politics with people they don’t know well, even at family dinners.
- As Partisan Hostility Grows, Signs of Frustration With the Two-Party System — Pew Research Center (2022)
- Guns, abortion and religion. These are deeply personal and tied to identity. Listen before offering a view.
- For Most U.S. Gun Owners, Protection Is the Main Reason They Own a Gun — Pew Research Center (2023)
- Religious Landscape Study: Executive Summary — Pew Research Center (2025)
- Race. Americans are both more and less comfortable talking about race than people elsewhere, and the vocabulary changes fast. Be humble and follow the other person’s lead.
- Improved Race and Ethnicity Measures Reveal U.S. Population Is Much More Multiracial — U.S. Census Bureau (2021)
- Health care and money. Medical bills, debt and salaries are real worries for many, and can be a sore point.
- Wars. Someone may have served, or lost a family member, in Iraq or Afghanistan.
- Costs of War: Human Costs of the Post-9/11 Wars — Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, Brown University (2023)
Common misconceptions
- “All Americans are the same.” The country is enormously varied by region, race, religion, class and politics; a Texan and a New Yorker may feel they have little in common.
- American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America — Colin Woodard, Viking (2011)
- “Americans don’t know anything about the world.” Many don’t travel abroad, partly because the country is so large, but the US also has huge immigrant communities and many people with family ties overseas.
- Mexican Immigrants in the United States — Migration Policy Institute (2024)
- “Everyone owns a gun.” Roughly a third of adults do; most do not.
- For Most U.S. Gun Owners, Protection Is the Main Reason They Own a Gun — Pew Research Center (2023)
- “America is a Christian country” / “America is becoming secular.” Both are half true: most Americans are still Christian, but nearly three in ten have no religion.
- Religious Landscape Study: Executive Summary — Pew Research Center (2025)
- “American history is short.” The United States is young as a state, but Native nations’ history on the land runs back thousands of years, and the Constitution is the world’s oldest written national constitution still in force.
- Indigenous Continent: The Epic Contest for North America — Pekka Hämäläinen, Liveright (2022)
- United States — Encyclopaedia Britannica
People everyone knows
Thomas Jefferson
Virginia planter, principal author of the Declaration of Independence and third president (1801–09). He wrote that "all men are created equal" while enslaving more than 600 people over his lifetime, and historians now broadly accept that he fathered children with Sally Hemings, an enslaved woman. He doubled the country's size with the Louisiana Purchase of 1803. Jefferson is the clearest example of America's founding contradiction: soaring ideals of liberty written by a man who denied it to others.
- The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family — Annette Gordon-Reed, W. W. Norton (2008)
- The Radicalism of the American Revolution — Gordon S. Wood, Alfred A. Knopf (1992)
- Give Me Liberty! An American History — Eric Foner, W. W. Norton (2004)
Frederick Douglass
Born into slavery in Maryland, he escaped in 1838 and became the most famous abolitionist orator and writer of his age. His 1845 Narrative and his 1852 speech "What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?" held the nation to its own founding words. He pressed Lincoln to enlist Black soldiers and spent Reconstruction fighting for equal citizenship. For many Americans he embodies the belief that the country's ideals are worth fighting for, even against the country itself.
- Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom — David W. Blight, Simon & Schuster (2018)
- What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July? (speech, Rochester, 5 July 1852) — Frederick Douglass (1852)
Abraham Lincoln
A self-taught Illinois lawyer elected president in 1860 on a platform of stopping slavery's spread, which triggered Southern secession. He led the Union through the Civil War, issued the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, framed the war at Gettysburg as a test of whether government "of the people, by the people, for the people" could survive, and pushed the Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery. He was assassinated in April 1865. Most historians rank him as the greatest US president.
- The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery — Eric Foner, W. W. Norton (2010)
- Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era — James M. McPherson, Oxford University Press (1988)
Sitting Bull (Tatanka Iyotake)
Hunkpapa Lakota leader and holy man who refused to accept reservation life and led resistance to US expansion onto the northern Plains. Warriors under his leadership, with Crazy Horse and others, destroyed Custer's command at the Little Bighorn in 1876. After years of exile in Canada he surrendered in 1881, and he was killed by Indian police during an arrest in December 1890, two weeks before the Wounded Knee massacre. He remains a symbol of Native resistance and survival.
- The Lance and the Shield: The Life and Times of Sitting Bull — Robert M. Utley, Henry Holt (1993)
- Indigenous Continent: The Epic Contest for North America — Pekka Hämäläinen, Liveright (2022)
Franklin D. Roosevelt
Elected four times (1932–44), the only president to serve more than two terms. Paralysed from the waist down by illness in 1921, he led the country through the Great Depression with the New Deal, which built Social Security and much of the modern federal government, and through the Second World War until his death in April 1945. To admirers he saved American democracy and capitalism; to critics he expanded government too far. Either way, the political argument he started still defines US politics.
- Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929–1945 — David M. Kennedy, Oxford University Press (1999)
- Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, 1932–1940 — William E. Leuchtenburg, Harper & Row (1963)
Martin Luther King Jr.
Baptist minister from Atlanta who became the leading voice of the civil rights movement, from the Montgomery bus boycott (1955–56) to the March on Washington (1963), where he gave the "I Have a Dream" speech, and the Selma campaign (1965). He combined Black church tradition with Gandhian nonviolence, won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964, and was assassinated in Memphis on 4 April 1968. Today he is a near-universal national hero with a federal holiday, though many forget how radical and unpopular he was in his lifetime.
- Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954–63 — Taylor Branch, Simon & Schuster (1988)
- Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945–1974 — James T. Patterson, Oxford University Press (1996)
Try it yourself
The quickest way into a culture: a song, a film, a book and a dish.
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
“What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim.”
“I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”
Listen
- This Land Is Your Land Woody Guthrie's 1940 folk song, written as a reply to "God Bless America", sung by schoolchildren and protesters alike.▶ Listen
- Jazz, blues and gospel Born from African American experience in the South and in cities like New Orleans, Chicago and New York, these are the roots of almost all American popular music, from rock 'n' roll to hip hop.▶ Listen
Watch
- It's a Wonderful Life Frank Capra's 1946 Christmas film about a small-town banker who learns what his ordinary life has meant; a fixture of American holidays.▶ Watch
Read
- Adventures of Huckleberry Finn Mark Twain's 1884 novel of a white boy and an escaped enslaved man rafting down the Mississippi; Hemingway said all modern American literature comes from it.Find it
- The Great Gatsby F.Find it
- Beloved Toni Morrison's 1987 novel about a woman haunted by the child she killed to save her from slavery.Find it
Taste
- Thanksgiving dinner Turkey, stuffing, cranberry sauce, mashed potatoes and pumpkin pie on the fourth Thursday of November, the one holiday nearly all Americans share regardless of faith.Recipe
- Barbecue Slow-smoked meat with fierce regional loyalties (Texas brisket, Carolina pulled pork, Kansas City ribs, Memphis dry rub), rooted in Southern and African American cooking.Recipe
See & do
- Hamilton Lin-Manuel Miranda's 2015 hip hop musical retelling the life of the immigrant founder Alexander Hamilton with a largely Black and Latino cast; a phenomenon, and a debate about how the founding is told.Look it up
- Football, baseball and basketball Baseball is the old "national pastime", the Super Bowl in February is the year's biggest TV event, and high-school "Friday night lights" bind small towns together.Look it up
Where
Homeland Diaspora Significant place
Related
Mexico · Ireland · Jewish people · Catholicism · China · Japan
Sources & further reading
- Estimating Global Civilian-Held Firearms Numbers — Aaron Karp, Small Arms Survey, 2018
- American Colonies: The Settling of North America — Alan Taylor, Viking Penguin, 2001
- A Wicked War: Polk, Clay, Lincoln, and the 1846 U.S. Invasion of Mexico — Amy S. Greenberg, Alfred A. Knopf, 2012
- The Real North Korea: Life and Politics in the Failed Stalinist Utopia — Andrei Lankov, Oxford University Press, 2013
- The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family — Annette Gordon-Reed, W. W. Norton, 2008
- Ingresos por remesas (balance of payments statistics) — Banco de México, 2025
- War of a Thousand Deserts: Indian Raids and the U.S.-Mexican War — Brian DeLay, Yale University Press, 2008
- The Philippine War, 1899–1902 — Brian McAllister Linn, University Press of Kansas, 2000
- The Korean War: A History — Bruce Cumings, Modern Library, 2010
- The Black Church in the African American Experience — C. Eric Lincoln and Lawrence H. Mamiya, Duke University Press, 1990
- Vietnamese Casualties During the American War: A New Estimate — Charles Hirschman, Samuel Preston and Vu Manh Loi, Population and Development Review, 1995
- China's Road to the Korean War: The Making of the Sino-American Confrontation — Chen Jian, Columbia University Press, 1994
- Vietnam: A New History — Christopher Goscha, Basic Books, 2016
- Unworthy Republic: The Dispossession of Native Americans and the Road to Indian Territory — Claudio Saunt, W. W. Norton, 2020
- American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America — Colin Woodard, Viking, 2011
- Registro Nacional de Personas Desaparecidas y No Localizadas — Comisión Nacional de Búsqueda de Personas, Gobierno de México, 2026
- Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929–1945 — David M. Kennedy, Oxford University Press, 1999
- Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom — David W. Blight, Simon & Schuster, 2018
- Braceros: Migrant Citizens and Transnational Subjects in the Postwar United States and Mexico — Deborah Cohen, University of North Carolina Press, 2011
- The Two Koreas: A Contemporary History — Don Oberdorfer and Robert Carlin, Basic Books, 2014
- Covering Islam: How the Media and the Experts Determine How We See the Rest of the World — Edward W. Said, Pantheon, 1981
- United States — Encyclopaedia Britannica
- Korean War — Encyclopaedia Britannica, Encyclopaedia Britannica
- September 11 attacks — Encyclopaedia Britannica
- Mexico — Encyclopaedia Britannica
- Barack Obama — Encyclopaedia Britannica
- Mexico: Biography of Power. A History of Modern Mexico, 1810–1996 — Enrique Krauze, HarperCollins, 1997
- Give Me Liberty! An American History — Eric Foner, W. W. Norton, 2004
- Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 — Eric Foner, Harper & Row, 1988
- The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery — Eric Foner, W. W. Norton, 2010
- The Arabs: A History — Eugene Rogan, Basic Books, 2009
- Decade of Betrayal: Mexican Repatriation in the 1930s — Francisco E. Balderrama and Raymond Rodríguez, University of New Mexico Press, 2006
- What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July? (speech, Rochester, 5 July 1852) — Frederick Douglass, 1852
- NAFTA Revisited: Achievements and Challenges — Gary Clyde Hufbauer and Jeffrey J. Schott, Peterson Institute for International Economics, 2005
- The Vietnam War: An Intimate History — Geoffrey C. Ward and Ken Burns, Alfred A. Knopf, 2017
- America's Longest War: The United States and Vietnam, 1950–1975 — George C. Herring, McGraw-Hill, 1979
- The Radicalism of the American Revolution — Gordon S. Wood, Alfred A. Knopf, 1992
- The Massacres at Mt. Halla: Sixty Years of Truth Seeking in South Korea — Hun Joon Kim, Cornell University Press, 2014
- Defunciones por homicidio (annual statistics) — INEGI (Instituto Nacional de Estadística y Geografía), 2025
- El Narco: Inside Mexico's Criminal Insurgency — Ioan Grillo, Bloomsbury, 2011
- Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America — Ira Berlin, Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1998
- The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration — Isabel Wilkerson, Random House, 2010
- A Census-Based Count of the Civil War Dead — J. David Hacker, Civil War History, 2011
- Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era — James M. McPherson, Oxford University Press, 1988
- Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945–1974 — James T. Patterson, Oxford University Press, 1996
- Islam: The Straight Path — John L. Esposito, Oxford University Press
- Misquoting Muhammad: The Challenge and Choices of Interpreting the Prophet's Legacy — Jonathan A. C. Brown, Oneworld, 2014
- México frente a Estados Unidos: un ensayo histórico, 1776–2000 — Josefina Zoraida Vázquez and Lorenzo Meyer, Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2001
- Opening Mexico: The Making of a Democracy — Julia Preston and Samuel Dillon, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004
- A History of the Vietnamese — K. W. Taylor, Cambridge University Press, 2013
- Hanoi's War: An International History of the War for Peace in Vietnam — Lien-Hang T. Nguyen, University of North Carolina Press, 2012
- The Qur'an: A New Translation — M. A. S. Abdel Haleem (trans.), Oxford University Press (Oxford World's Classics), 2004
- A History of Saudi Arabia (2nd edition) — Madawi Al-Rasheed, Cambridge University Press, 2010
- Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America — Mae M. Ngai, Princeton University Press, 2004
- I Have a Dream (address at the March on Washington, 28 August 1963) — Martin Luther King Jr. Research and Education Institute, Stanford University, 1963
- America Divided: The Civil War of the 1960s — Maurice Isserman and Michael Kazin, Oxford University Press, 2000
- The Course of Mexican History — Michael C. Meyer, William L. Sherman and Susan M. Deeds, Oxford University Press, 2014
- Mexican Immigrants in the United States — Migration Policy Institute, 2024
- Separated families statistics (Integrated Information System for Separated Families) — Ministry of Unification, Republic of Korea, Ministry of Unification
- The 9/11 Commission Report — National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, 2004
- The Chiapas Rebellion: The Struggle for Land and Democracy — Neil Harvey, Duke University Press, 1998
- The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story — Nikole Hannah-Jones (ed.), One World, 2021
- The Philippine-American War, 1899–1902 — Office of the Historian, U.S. Department of State
- State and Society in the Philippines — Patricio N. Abinales and Donna J. Amoroso, Rowman & Littlefield, 2017
- The Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States, and the Philippines — Paul A. Kramer, University of North Carolina Press, 2006
- Indigenous Continent: The Epic Contest for North America — Pekka Hämäläinen, Liveright, 2022
- For Most U.S. Gun Owners, Protection Is the Main Reason They Own a Gun — Pew Research Center, 2023
- As Partisan Hostility Grows, Signs of Frustration With the Two-Party System — Pew Research Center, 2022
- Religious Landscape Study: Executive Summary — Pew Research Center, 2025
- What the data says about gun deaths in the U.S. — Pew Research Center, 2025
- Facts on Hispanics of Mexican origin in the United States, 2021 — Pew Research Center, 2023
- U.S. Muslims Concerned About Their Place in Society, but Continue to Believe in the American Dream — Pew Research Center, 2017
- The World's Muslims: Religion, Politics and Society — Pew Research Center, 2013
- Line in the Sand: A History of the Western U.S.-Mexico Border — Rachel St. John, Princeton University Press, 2011
- The Philippines: A Past Revisited — Renato Constantino, Tala Publishing, 1975
- The Lance and the Shield: The Life and Times of Sitting Bull — Robert M. Utley, Henry Holt, 1993
- Coming to America: A History of Immigration and Ethnicity in American Life — Roger Daniels, HarperCollins, 1990
- American Indian Holocaust and Survival: A Population History since 1492 — Russell Thornton, University of Oklahoma Press, 1987
- Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database — SlaveVoyages Consortium
- In Our Image: America's Empire in the Philippines — Stanley Karnow, Random House, 1989
- Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954–63 — Taylor Branch, Simon & Schuster, 1988
- History of the Filipino People — Teodoro A. Agoncillo, Garotech, 1990
- Jihad in Saudi Arabia: Violence and Pan-Islamism since 1979 — Thomas Hegghammer, Cambridge University Press, 2010
- Improved Race and Ethnicity Measures Reveal U.S. Population Is Much More Multiracial — U.S. Census Bureau, 2021
- Declaration of Independence: A Transcription — U.S. National Archives
- Vietnam War U.S. Military Fatal Casualty Statistics — U.S. National Archives
- Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant — Ulysses S. Grant, Charles L. Webster & Company, 1885
- Letter from five historians on The 1619 Project, with the editor's response — Victoria Bynum, James M. McPherson, James Oakes, Sean Wilentz and Gordon S. Wood; Jake Silverstein, The New York Times Magazine, 2019
- Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War — Viet Thanh Nguyen, Harvard University Press, 2016
- Costs of War: Human Costs of the Post-9/11 Wars — Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, Brown University, 2023
- Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, 1932–1940 — William E. Leuchtenburg, Harper & Row, 1963
- Rethinking the Korean War: A New Diplomatic and Strategic History — William Stueck, Princeton University Press, 2002
- Body Counts: The Vietnam War and Militarized Refugees — Yến Lê Espiritu, University of California Press, 2014