America

250 true stories. 250 specific reasons to feel quietly, sincerely proud of this country.

For the reader who is tired of being told he should be ashamed of America. Inside these pages are two hundred and fifty stories about the people, the moments, and the achievements that built a country worth celebrating. One story for every year the United States has been on the map.

This is not a coffee-table picture book with a thousand words of text. This is not a year-by-year march that gives 1776 and 1923 the same single paragraph. This is not a devotional that asks the reader to share a particular faith. This is a story collection, written in the warm, plainspoken voice of someone who has lived a while and is still glad to be an American.

You will meet Caesar Rodney riding eighty miles through a Delaware thunderstorm to cast the tie-breaking vote on the Declaration. Haym Salomon, a Polish-born Jewish broker who raised the money that paid for Yorktown and died a pauper. Norman Borlaug, an Iowa plant pathologist credited with saving a billion lives. Gail Halvorsen dropping homemade chocolate parachutes to West Berlin children. The Navajo Code Talkers, the Tuskegee Airmen, the dental student who walked into a poisoned tunnel under Lake Erie in his pajamas. Two hundred and fifty stories like these, every one of them anchored on a verified date, name, number, or place.

• 250 NUMBERED STORIES, ORGANIZED BY THEME: Browse by what interests you. Founding, civil rights, inventions, science, space, war and rescue, arts, sports, or American character. Read one story before bed, three over coffee, or a chapter at a sitting. No need to start at page one.
• EVERY STORY SOURCED, EVERY FACT CHECKABLE: Around 310 unique sources are footnoted across the book. Library of Congress. National Archives. NASA. NIH. The Smithsonian. NobelPrize.org. Founders' personal papers. No invented quotations. No hand-waving. Every story holds up.
• STORIES YOU KNOW AND STORIES YOU DON'T: The famous moments are here told with fresh detail, like Apollo 11, Pearl Harbor, and the Miracle on Ice, alongside dozens of stories most readers have never heard. A Mexican-American farm family who won a school desegregation case seven years before Brown. A young John Adams defending the British soldiers who shot Crispus Attucks.
• HONEST ABOUT THE HARD PARTS, PROUD OF THE LARGER ARC: The book does not whitewash slavery, internment, or Jim Crow. It tells those stories straight, then turns to what the country did to fix them. The soldiers who died ending slavery. The Civil Rights Act. The Medal of Honor that came home to Daniel Inouye.
• THE PERFECT GIFT FOR THE 250TH: Built for Father's Day, the Fourth of July, graduations, veterans, teachers, grandparents, and anyone marking the Semiquincentennial. Designed to be passed around the family, opened to any page, and shared at the dinner table.

Happy 250, America. Pick a page and start reading.