10 books to help you understand America as its 250th birthday approaches

10 books to help you understand America as its 250th birthday approaches With the nation's big 2-5-0 coming up next year, NPR staff and critics recommended a lot of U.S.-focused titles for Books We Love, our annual year-end reading guide . Below you'll find 10 favorites - perfect for the history buff on your gift list, or anyone looking to learn more about how the U.S got to where it is today. Read on, or check out our full 2025 list here . American Grammar: Race, Education, and the Building of a Nation , by Jarvis R. Givens In this deeply researched book, Harvard University professor of education and African American studies Jarvis R. Givens locates 1819 as a "crossroads" in the history of education in the United States. That year, Congress passed the Civilization Fund Act, providing funding for assimilative boarding schools for Native American children, and the governor of Virginia signed an anti-literacy law that made it a crime to teach enslaved people to read and write in schools. Amid the Trump administration's effort to dismantle the Department of Education, Givens' clear-eyed assessment of American education offers an opportunity to reflect on the long-standing relationships among race, power and schooling in the U.S. - Kristen Martin , book critic and author of The Sun Won't Come Out Tomorrow: The Dark History of American Orphanhood Buy Featured Book Your purchase helps support NPR programming. How? The Fate of the Day: The War for America, Fort Ticonderoga to Charleston, 1777-1780, by Rick Atkinson I've been eagerly waiting years for this book! This is the second volume of Rick Atkinson's trilogy on the American Revolution. Atkinson makes good use of letters and diaries. You feel like you're in the middle of a battle, with all the sights, sounds and tragedy. Harrowing tales of hand-to-hand fighting, scalping and desperate evacuations. Fine detail: the waxed mustaches of the Hessian forces, the number of rum barrels distributed to weary and ill-clad troops, the dull thud of cannonballs smacking into ships. The stench of makeshift hospitals, with piles of limbs stacked outside. He carefully lays out how the battles began, and the successes, mistakes and missed opportunities - on both sides. - Tom Bowman , Pentagon reporter Buy Featured Book Your purchase helps support NPR programming. How? History Matters , by David McCullough, Dorie McCullough Lawson (contributor), and Michael Hill (contributor) If history can be a comfort read, this is it. David McCullough's daughter Dorie McCullough Lawson and his longtime researcher, Michael Hill, assembled this posthumous collection over two years. Some of the historian's old manuscripts and files were kept in a New England barn, so the occasional acorn and nest turned up along with the historian's glorious observations about Americans and their history. The essay subjects are diverse - painter Thomas Eakins, Harriet Beecher Stowe in Paris, "A Book on Every Bed" (it will melt your heart). One theme emerges that you might find reassuring in its own way: There was no "simpler time."...

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