America, U.S.A.
How Race Shadows the Nation's Anniversaries
Failed to add items
Sorry, we are unable to add the item because your shopping cart is already at capacity.
Add to basket failed.
Please try again later
Add to Wish List failed.
Please try again later
Remove from Wish List failed.
Please try again later
Follow podcast failed
Unfollow podcast failed
1 credit a month to buy any audiobook in our entire collection.
Unlimited access to our all-you-can-listen catalogue of 15K+ audiobooks and podcasts.
Member-only deals & discounts.
Auto-renews at $16.45/mo after 30 days. Cancel anytime.
America, U.S.A.
Pre-order for $26.99
-
Narrated by:
About this listen
Celebrated public intellectual Eddie S. Glaude, Jr. presents a groundbreaking analysis of the vicious cycles of American history and the country’s enduring refusal to face its true nature—especially at the moments when national anniversaries steer us back toward the mythology meant to disguise the truth.
America, U.S.A., deliberately formulated and beautifully written, details a heart-wrenching exploration of America’s legacy. It is a magnificently complex combination of lessons and voices—from W.E.B. DuBois and John Dos Passos to Herman Melville and Martin Luther King, Jr.—that, together, paint a sprawling and honest tableau of the United States, its complicated past, and ever more tenuous future. Glaude’s is a powerful voice of conscience in our tumultuous world. He pulls no punches, calling on us to interrogate our conceptions of innocence and freedom and the stories we tell ourselves about our past and present.
Centered around the major celebrations of America’s milestone birthdays across 250 years of history, the book offers a riveting look at the battles over who has a stake in writing the American story. Devastatingly candid, profoundly moving, and deeply reflective, America, U.S.A. is a shining meditation on how we must reckon with a grim past in order to strive for the better angels of our future.
Critic Reviews
“No one understands the excruciating interiors of our ‘original sin’ better than Eddie Glaude. His scholarship extends into the darkest corners of our past. His insight offers fragments of a map leading to higher ground.”—Ken Burns
“America, U.S.A. is a bracing and elegant analysis of the contradiction at the heart of the American experiment: a country that claims to be committed to equality also adheres to white supremacy. Glaude opens a necessary conversation as we reflect on the meaning of our country’s 250th anniversary.”—Annette Gordon-Reed, Harvard University, Pulitzer Prize– and National Book Award–winning author of The Hemingses of Monticello
“Eddie Glaude reckons with the power of our stated values—liberty, freedom, equality, and independence—in the dim light of our actual unwillingness to share, sacrifice, yield, and prosper for the national good. Glaude is honest, bracing, and devastatingly brilliant.”—Min Jin Lee, author of Free Food for Millionaires and Pachinko, a National Book Award Finalist
“This is a thoughtful, insightful, beautifully written book that is timely and welcomed in these perilous times.”—Bryan Stevenson, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Just Mercy
“With exquisite prose, stunning moral clarity, abundant heart and soul, and utter genius, yet again Eddie Glaude proves why he is so often referred to as the conscience of the nation. In the tradition of W.E.B. Dubois’ classic, The Souls of Black Folk, America, U.S.A. marks the 250th anniversary of the nation, yet it does so much more. It makes the stakes of America’s complex, anguished, and beautiful story clear as a bell.”—Imani Perry, Harvard University, National Book Award–winning author of South to America
“Glaude at once anticipates and rues the tumult of 2026, in a divided America whose reckoning with race and history remains woefully unfinished.”—Jill Lepore, Harvard University, New York Times bestselling author of This America
“Glaude provides a diagnosis of our current national shame, of our most bitter contradictions between promises and disappointments, and a vision of how real hope is born in a deep, transcendent sense of tragedy.”—David W. Blight, Yale University, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom
“As we approach the semi-quincentennial of American independence, Glaude has gifted us with a guide to understanding the history of our current moment and offers us ideas on how we can, in truth, forge a more perfect union.”—Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Harvard University, New York Times bestselling author of The Black Church
“America, U.S.A. is a bracing and elegant analysis of the contradiction at the heart of the American experiment: a country that claims to be committed to equality also adheres to white supremacy. Glaude opens a necessary conversation as we reflect on the meaning of our country’s 250th anniversary.”—Annette Gordon-Reed, Harvard University, Pulitzer Prize– and National Book Award–winning author of The Hemingses of Monticello
“Eddie Glaude reckons with the power of our stated values—liberty, freedom, equality, and independence—in the dim light of our actual unwillingness to share, sacrifice, yield, and prosper for the national good. Glaude is honest, bracing, and devastatingly brilliant.”—Min Jin Lee, author of Free Food for Millionaires and Pachinko, a National Book Award Finalist
“This is a thoughtful, insightful, beautifully written book that is timely and welcomed in these perilous times.”—Bryan Stevenson, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Just Mercy
“With exquisite prose, stunning moral clarity, abundant heart and soul, and utter genius, yet again Eddie Glaude proves why he is so often referred to as the conscience of the nation. In the tradition of W.E.B. Dubois’ classic, The Souls of Black Folk, America, U.S.A. marks the 250th anniversary of the nation, yet it does so much more. It makes the stakes of America’s complex, anguished, and beautiful story clear as a bell.”—Imani Perry, Harvard University, National Book Award–winning author of South to America
“Glaude at once anticipates and rues the tumult of 2026, in a divided America whose reckoning with race and history remains woefully unfinished.”—Jill Lepore, Harvard University, New York Times bestselling author of This America
“Glaude provides a diagnosis of our current national shame, of our most bitter contradictions between promises and disappointments, and a vision of how real hope is born in a deep, transcendent sense of tragedy.”—David W. Blight, Yale University, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom
“As we approach the semi-quincentennial of American independence, Glaude has gifted us with a guide to understanding the history of our current moment and offers us ideas on how we can, in truth, forge a more perfect union.”—Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Harvard University, New York Times bestselling author of The Black Church
No reviews yet
In the spirit of reconciliation, Audible acknowledges the Traditional Custodians of country throughout Australia and their connections to land, sea and community. We pay our respect to their elders past and present and extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples today.