“American anniversaries are often moments to turn a blind eye to the evils of the past and the present—to suppress the fact of America’s divided soul.” So writes Eddie S. Glaude Jr. in America, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversaries (Crown, May 26), his impassioned assessment of the state of the union—vis-à-vis its dark history—as the country prepares to celebrate its 250th anniversary. Progress has been achieved in this country, of course, but it’s also met by its opposite, as when, by 1926, “the idea of the white American evolved as European ethnics joined the fold, though not without resistance. The 1920s were, in a way, the decade of the Ku Klux Klan, and the organization’s view of European immigrants was, to put it mildly, hostile.” Our review praises Glaude’s book as “a charged renunciation of American unfreedom that could not be timelier.” A historian at Princeton University, he is also the author of Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own (2020). We spoke by phone.

As you researched your book, what did you learn that surprised you the most?

The repetition. You know, I had an intuition that there’s this cycle to American history. But to see the challenge that the country faced in telling itself a story about its founding—and how that challenge was met by way of the erasure of Black people—you see some of the similar pressure points, and it’s all rooted in navigating this divided soul of the nation. So I think it’s the repetition, the kind of haunting, that shows up every milestone anniversary that really, really shocked me.

Americans are known for their patriotism but not always for an attentiveness to our history. How can we do better at teaching and learning history?

I think it’s absolutely necessary, it’s critical to our survival as a country, that we step outside of myth and fantasy and tell a true story of the country. We have to leave the storybook version of the country behind. How do we do that? As a writer, my task is to bear witness, right? And that is to tell the story in as robust a way as I can, to offer resources for people to imagine themselves differently, for the country to imagine itself differently. I think part of the task is for writers and intellectuals and scholars and academics and pundits to bring the full complexity of the American journey into full interview.

If you could correct one major, common misconception about U.S. history, what would that be?

That we’re innocent. You know, I think there is this feature of the myth, of the fantasy, that America is by definition, constitutively, a site of the good. And I think that view, that sense of our innocence, of our inherent goodness, keeps us from growing up as a country.

How would you like your book to contribute to the conversation of where we are now as a country?

We’re in the midst of a fever dream. And that fever dream relies heavily on the fantasy.…My book attempts to speak back. It attempts to tell a different story. And, hopefully, people will see it and be moved by it.

When you look at America today, what gives you the most hope for the nation’s future?

I think what gives me hope every single day, apart from the abstraction of the nation, are everyday, ordinary people—you know, the people who are capable of being miraculous, even if they are also capable of being monstrous. So, my faith is in us to be otherwise. And I just want to set the stage for that to happen, as best as I can.

John McMurtrie is the nonfiction editor.