A sweeping history, drawing upon election returns, political polls, news reports, and statistical abstracts that tell the story of how the country of our parents and grandparents became our country and that of our children.

He's the man everyone's talking about. He's taken on gun freaks, stupid white men and corporate crooks. Now Michael Moore is on a new mission: to get us of our behinds and kicking out the corrupt political elites who rule our lives.

One of America's foremost philosophers challenges the lost generation of the American Left to understand the role it might play in the great tradition of democratic intellectual labor that started with writers such as Walt Whitman and John Dewey.

"This Country of Ours" is a collection of extraordinary stories from the history of the United States beginning with accounts of exploration and settlement and ending with the presidency of Woodrow Wilson. This is a book which when you lay it down will make you say, "I'm glad that I was born an American." Contents: Stories of Explorers and Pioneers How the Vikings of Old Sought and Found New Lands The Sea of Darkness and the Great Faith of Columbus How Columbus Fared Forth Upon the Sea of Darkness and Came to Pleasant Lands Beyond How Columbus Returned in Triumph How America Was Named How the Flag of England Was Planted on the Shores of the New World How the Flag of France Was Planted in Florida How the French Founded a Colony in Florida How the Spaniards Drove the French Out of Florida How a Frenchman Avenged the Death of His Countrymen The Adventures of Sir Humphrey Gilbert About Sir Walter Raleigh's Adventures in the Golden West Stories of Virginia The Adventures of Captain John Smith More Adventures of Captain John Smith How the Colony Was Saved How Pocahontas Took a Journey Over the Seas How the Redmen Fought Against Their White Brothers How Englishmen Fought a Duel With Tyranny The Coming of the Cavaliers Bacon's Rebellion The Story of the Knights of the Golden Horseshoe Stories of New England The Story of the Pilgrim Fathers The Founding of Massachusetts The Story of Harry Vane The Story of Anne Hutchinson and the Founding of Rhode Island The Founding of Harvard How Quakers First Came to New England How Maine and New Hampshire Were Founded The Founding of Connecticut and War With the Indians The Founding of New Haven The Hunt for the Regicides King Philip's War How the Charter of Connecticut Was Saved The Witches of Salem Stories of the Middle and Southern Colonies Stories of the French in America Stories of the Struggle for Liberty The Boston Tea-party Stories of the United States Under the Constitution

When Anglo-Americans looked west after the Revolution, they hoped to see a blank slate upon which to build their continental republic. However, French settlers had inhabited the territory stretching from Ohio to Oregon for over a century, blending into Native American networks, economies, and communities. Images of these French settlers saturated nearly every American text concerned with the West. Edward Watts argues that these representations of French colonial culture played a significant role in developing the identity of the new nation. In regard to land, labor, gender, family, race, and religion, American interpretations of the French frontier became a means of sorting the empire builders from those with a more moderate and contained nation in mind, says Watts. Romantic nationalists such as George Bancroft, Francis Parkman, and Lyman Beecher used the French model to justify the construction of a nascent empire. Alternatively, writers such as Margaret Fuller, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and James Hall presented a less aggressive vision of the nation based on the colonial French themselves. By examining how representations of the French shaped these conversations, Watts offers an alternative view of antebellum culture wars.

NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY VULTURE AND ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY NPR • Against the Country is a gift for fans of Southern Gothic and metafiction alike. Set in the Virginia pines, and overrun with failed parents, racist sex offenders, cast-off priests, and suicidal chickens, this novel challenges literary convention even as it attacks our national myth—that the rural naturally engenders good, while the urban breeds an inevitable sin. In a voice both perfectly American and utterly new, Ben Metcalf introduces the reader to Goochland County, Virginia—a land of stubborn soil, voracious insects, lackluster farms, and horrifying trees—and details one family’s pitiful struggle to survive there. Eventually it becomes clear that Goochland is not merely the author’s setting; it is a growing, throbbing menace that warps and scars every one of his characters’ lives. Equal parts fiery criticism and icy farce, Against the Country is the most hilarious sermon one is likely to hear on the subject of our native soil, and the starkest celebration of the language our land produced. The result is a literary tour de force that raises the question: Was there ever a narrator, in all our literature, so precise, so far-reaching, so eloquently misanthropic, as the one encountered here? Praise for Against the Country “Iconoclastic . . . Against the Country has obvious affinities to Southern Gothic, both in its voice and in the delight it takes in rural ignorance and grotesqueries. . . . [A] country cousin of David Foster Wallace.”—The New York Times Book Review “Exceptional in its verbal brilliance and conscientiousness, Against the Country involves us in a family’s anguished and hilarious struggle against the strange dooms that seem peculiar to white rural America. This is a savage and gladdening novel.”—Joseph O’Neill, author of Netherland and The Dog “Metcalf’s unnamed narrator dazzles with his Puritan deadpan and capacious intellect, not to mention his double-barreled blasts of dark humor and wicked satire. . . . There are so many brilliant turns of phrase in Against the Country that it’s hard to choose favorites, but Metcalf is at his sharpest and most seductive when his antihero does more than blast and blame, when he steps outside his sermons to say something real. . . . Every note in every solo is sounded with exquisite perfection.”—Slate “Faulknerian . . . eccentric, magnificent Southern Gothic metafiction.”—Vanity Fair “Ben Metcalf is a brilliant writer, and Against the Country is an ingenious and hilarious novel, a glittering, bitter celebration of how the lousiness of life can be redeemed in the hands (and mouth) of a top-shelf teller of life’s stories.”—Sam Lipsyte, author of The Ask and The Fun Parts “A daring conglomeration of every trick, swindle and gimmick possible using only ink and paper, a pulpwood imagination machine so finely and expertly wrought that it can take on Jefferson, Thoreau, the church, patriotism, race relations, sexual identity, J. D. Salinger, the myth of America and a thousand other targets . . . [Against the Country] is absolutely and completely worth all investment of time and effort, because it is an undeniably beautiful object, sharp as a new razor.”—NPR “One of the more necessary—and most eloquent—expressions of a distinctly American, provincial rage in some years.”—Flavorwire

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • GOOD MORNING AMERICA BUZZ PICK • ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The New York Times Book Review, Financial Times, The Washington Post, Time, Los Angeles Times, New York Post, Town & Country, Good Housekeeping, Kirkus Reviews “A perfect novel for these times and all times, the single textual artifact from the pandemic era I would place in a time capsule as a representation of all that is good and true and beautiful about literature.”—Molly Young, The New York Times (Editors’ Choice) Eight friends, one country house, and six months in isolation—a novel about love, friendship, family, and betrayal hailed as a “virtuoso performance” (USA Today) and “an homage to Chekhov with four romances and a finale that will break your heart” (The Washington Post) In the rolling hills of upstate New York, a group of friends and friends-of-friends gathers in a country house to wait out the pandemic. Over the next six months, new friendships and romances will take hold, while old betrayals will emerge, forcing each character to reevaluate whom they love and what matters most. The unlikely cast of characters includes a Russian-born novelist; his Russian-born psychiatrist wife; their precocious child obsessed with K-pop; a struggling Indian American writer; a wildly successful Korean American app developer; a global dandy with three passports; a Southern flamethrower of an essayist; and a movie star, the Actor, whose arrival upsets the equilibrium of this chosen family. Both elegiac and very, very funny, Our Country Friends is the most ambitious book yet by the author of the beloved bestseller Super Sad True Love Story.