Every round-number anniversary America throws itself, the same ritual repeats: bunting goes up, speeches invoke the founders, and the harder truths get quietly filed away until the next commemorative decade rolls around. Eddie S. Glaude Jr.’s “America, U.S.A.” arrives just as the country gears up for its 250th birthday, and it asks the question nobody wants raised at the party: what exactly are we celebrating, and who gets left out of the toast?
Glaude, the chair of Princeton’s African American Studies department and a familiar voice from cable news, builds his argument around four national anniversaries — 1826, 1876, 1926, and the present run-up to 2026 — tracing how each one became an occasion for reasserting a sanitized national mythology just as racial progress threatened to complicate it. The book moves chronologically but never mechanically, using each centennial or semicentennial as a pressure point where the gap between America’s stated ideals and its practiced exclusions opened widest. It reads less like a straight history than an argument about how anniversaries function as instruments of forgetting, carried by the same clear-eyed moral seriousness that ran through Glaude’s earlier books on Baldwin and the long shadow of the Obama years.
What makes the book work is Glaude’s refusal to let the argument collapse into either nostalgia or despair. He’s a careful reader of primary sources — from Frederick Douglass’s 1876 Fourth of July address to the propaganda machinery of the 1926 sesquicentennial — and he pairs that archival work with the kind of plainspoken, cadenced prose that made “Begin Again” so readable. The book is also structurally smart: by returning to the same ritual, the anniversary, every fifty years, Glaude lets readers watch the pattern repeat in real time rather than simply asserting that it exists. That repetition becomes the book’s most persuasive device.
Reviewers have generally praised the book’s ambition and its timing, landing on shelves just as the country’s own 250th commemoration ramps up. Critics have singled out the sections on the 1876 centennial — held the same year federal troops withdrew from the postwar South — as the book’s sharpest, and have credited Glaude with resisting easy cynicism even as he catalogs a long record of broken promises. Some have wanted a more expansive final chapter, arguing the book’s meditation on the present moment feels thinner than its confident handling of the past. But the broad consensus treats “America, U.S.A.” as a serious, well-timed intervention rather than a polemic — history written with an eye on the headlines without sacrificing its scholarly footing.
“America, U.S.A.” isn’t comfortable reading, and it isn’t meant to be. Glaude has written the rare anniversary book that argues against the anniversary itself, or at least against the version of it designed to smooth over hard history. For readers heading into 2026’s commemorations already skeptical of the bunting, this is the corrective text. For everyone else, it might be the more necessary read.
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