The American Birthday Syllabus

When reading, I try to focus on one topic at a time. I call this “syllabus style”. The idea is pretty simple: go all in on a topic, diving into and out of a subject at various levels of granularity to really grasp it. I’ve done this multiple times- one for the history of “The Slave Power”, one for the history of European Imperialism, one for developmental econ, but that is another post.

Right now, I am working on the American Birthday Syllabus. Every book I read from now until July 4, 2026, is going to be about American history.

The problem is that I’ve already read a lot about American history, so I can’t recommend anybody follow up with my reading unless they’re also open to integrating other perspectives. Specifically, my reading is going to be fairly… patriotic… but I’ve already done a lot of “lies your teacher told you” type reading that deserves to be included.

Here is what I’ve read, that isn’t on “the birthday list” but deserves to be read by others:

• Charles C. Mann, 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus
• Pekka Hämäläinen*,* Lakota America: A New History of Indigenous Power
• Pekka Hämäläinen, Indigenous Continent: The Epic Contest for North America
• Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns
• Douglas Blackmon, Slavery by Another Name

These books were really wonderful histories about both Indigenous peoples and Black Americans. They’re packed with necessary details to contextualize American history.

That being said- the idea behind American Birthday Syllabus is to bounce back and forth between “General American History” and “Revolutionary history” at my leisure. To really see, “Oh, this is what the Revolution actually was” and then follow it up with “This is what the revolution actually caused” in a cycle.

Here it is:

• General American History
  • David Hackett Fischer, Albion’s Seed
  • Daniel Richter, Before the Revolution: America’s Ancient Pasts
  • Mike Wallace, Greater Gotham: A History of New York City from 1898 to 1919
  • Jonathan Levy, Ages of American Capitalism: A History of the United States
  • Alan Taylor, American Republics
  • Michael Willrich, Pox: An American History
  • Arthur Herman, Freedom’s Forge
  • Robert Gordon, The Rise and Fall of American Growth
  • Robert Caro, The Power Broker
  • James Belich, Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Angloworld
• Revolutionary History
  • Alan Taylor, American Revolutions: A Continental History, 1750-1804
  • Holger Hoock, Scars of Independence: America’s Violent Birth
  • Rick Atkinson, The British Are Coming
  • Rick Atkinson, The Fate of the Day
  • Jonathan Israel, The Expanding Blaze: How the American Revolution Ignited the World, 1775 - 1848
  • Fareed Zakaria, Age of Revolutions: Progress and Backlash from 1600 to the Present

At the same time, I have a side project that I will find time for, wherein I will find some of the best primary sources (Common Sense, the best Federalist papers, important Presidential letters and articles) and print them out into my own personalized reader to go through at my leisure.