America turns 250 years old in just a few weeks.
Candidate Trump promised a party like no other, and it’s looking like that's going to be a campaign promise he keeps.
There's a full, WWII-style military parade planned for Washington, the largest maritime gathering in modern American history coming to New York Harbor, and even a UFC championship fight on the South Lawn.
No. I am not kidding.
I don’t even know…
I always find it strange that for all of the pomp and circumstance around the American experiment, most of what people know about American history actually clusters around a single summer in 1776 and a couple of snapshot moments—a “shot heard round the world”, fifty-six men, a declaration, one very famous painting of Washington in a boat, stuff like that.
The founding is the part everybody agrees was good, so that's the part we celebrate and the part that features in every school textbook and parade speech.
The fifty years after it are considerably messier, but I’d argue that they’re also considerably more important to understand.
Volume 3 of our America's History series covers 1791 to 1849, which means it covers the first presidencies and the first time the men who wrote the Constitution entered government and had to figure out what it actually meant in practice.
The answer, they found out pretty quickly, was that they disagreed dramatically about how to move from principle to practice. And, in several notable cases, they did things everyone understood the document probably didn't authorize, but they did them anyway because the reasons seemed good enough at the time.
Hamilton built a national bank that Jefferson called flatly unconstitutional.
Adams signed the Alien and Sedition Acts, which made it a crime to criticize the federal government roughly seven years after the First Amendment was ratified.
Jefferson bought Louisiana from Napoleon, which was one of the most consequential land deals in human history, but also acknowledged in a private letter that he had no constitutional authority to do it, but thought it was too good a deal to pass up.
These are the stories that explain the distance between what the document says and what the government actually does—a distance that has been there from the very beginning, and that your kids are going to spend their whole lives navigating because it isn’t getting any better.
That’s why they need to know the real history of the United States.
Preorders for Volume 3 are now open
Volumes 1 and 2 are both on major sale right now if you haven't grabbed them yet. And bonus, because you’ve got time to get through them before Volume 3 ships at the end of June!
Two hundred and fifty years is a lot of history, and a whole lot of it is worth celebrating.
It’s time to learn what happened after 1776.
— Connor
