U.S. History at the 250th

CATHERINE CLINTON is the Denman Professor of American History at the University of Texas at San Antonio. She has served as president of the Southern Historical Association, is an elected member of the Society of American Historians, and a recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship. She is the author and editor of more than two dozen volumes, including Harriet Tubman: The Road to Freedom; Mrs. Lincoln: A Life; Stepdaughters of History; and Civil War Stories (Georgia). JIM DOWNS is the Gilder Lehrman-National Endowment for the Humanities Professor of History at Gettysburg College. He is the author of Maladies of Empire: How Colonialism, Slavery, and War Transformed Medicine, Sick from Freedom: African-American Illness and Suffering during the Civil War and Reconstruction and the coeditor of Beyond Freedom: Disrupting the History of Emancipation and Connexions: Histories of Race and Sex in North America. WILLIAM STURKEY is an associate professor of history at the the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is the author of Hattiesburg: An American City in Black and White and To Write in the Light of Freedom: The Newspapers of the 1964 Mississippi Freedom Schools.

In this lively and accessible volume, some of our most esteemed historians discuss the origin stories of the United States as we prepare to celebrate the semiquincentennial, ultimately debating the purposes of patriotism itself. Accompanied by a variety of founding documents and manifestoes, this is an excellent primer on the many meanings of 1776.