A growing collection of books that can help to better understand the past, present, and perhaps future of the US.
created by miarboretum
last updated July, 2026
On Freedom
Timothy Snyder
Informed Power: Communication in the Early American South
Alejandra Dubcovsky
The Republic of Mass Culture: Journalism, Filmmaking, and Broadcasting in America since 1941 (The American Moment)
James L. Baughman
News for All the People: The Epic Story of Race and the American Media
Juan GonzĂĄlez
Angel Island: Immigrant Gateway to America
Erika Lee
Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America
Mae M. Ngai
The INS on the Line: Making Immigration Law on the US-Mexico Border, 1917-1954
S. Deborah Kang
A Nation Without Borders: The United States and Its World in an Age of Civil Wars, 1830-1910 (The Penguin History of the United States)
Steven Hahn
Cooperating with the Colossus: A Social and Political History of US Military Bases in World War II Latin America
Rebecca Herman
The Deportation Machine: America's Long History of Expelling Immigrants (Politics and Society in Modern America)
Adam Goodman
Expelling the Poor: Atlantic Seaboard States and the Nineteenth-Century Origins of American Immigration Policy
Hidetaka Hirota
A Queer History of the United States (ReVisioning American History)
Michael Bronski
The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America
Richard Rothstein
American Grammar: Race, Education, and the Building of a Nation
Jarvis R. Givens
Original Sins: The (Mis)education of Black and Native Children and the Construction of American Racism
Eve L. Ewing
Poverty, by America
Matthew Desmond
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
Frederick Douglass
Ain't I a Woman?
Sojourner Truth
Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches
Audre Lorde
America, América: A New History of the New World
Greg Grandin
Bitter Fruit: The Story of the American Coup in Guatemala
Stephen C. Schlesinger
The Autobiography of Malcolm X
Malcolm X
The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness
Michelle Alexander
An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States (ReVisioning American History, #3)
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America
Clint Smith
Defectors: The Rise of the Latino Far Right and What It Means for America
Paola Ramos
The Puerto Rican War: A Graphic History
John Vasquez Mejias
Questions 27 & 28
Karen Tei Yamashita
Republic and Empire: Crisis, Revolution, and Americaâs Early Independence
Trevor Burnard
Freedom Round the Globe: A World History of the American Revolution
Sarah M.S. Pearsall
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