As the United States of America observes its 250th birthday, it’s a fraught moment when many of us don’t feel celebratory. But some recent Indie titles highlight a heritage we can be proud of—and some remind us of how far we still have to go.

Chikasa 1889: The Collins-Gatschet Chickasaw Manuscripts offers a fascinating linguistic portrait of the Chikasaw people and stands as a vital bulwark against the loss of the Chikashshanompa’ language, which today has vanishingly few speakers. The book collects two seminal works by politician and educator Judson Dwight Collins and Swiss ethnologist and linguist Albert Samuel Gatschet. The manuscripts contain “whole narratives and examples of complete, interconnected speech in sentence form,” per the text, in addition to essays by the collection’s editors that provide historical context. This is a revelatory and important work of preservation available to general audiences for the first time.

In The House Archives Built & Other Thoughts on Black Archival Possibilities, Dorothy Berry offers a stinging indictment of the ways in which academic historians “sideline and demean the efforts and perspectives of Black archivists as if being the user of archival material as a scholar is more important than the role of the archivist in compiling, organizing, preserving, and acquiring the material.” She also recounts her own family’s fascinating history—her father, a Black man in the Missouri Ozarks who never finished high school, ran a local museum that preserved the stories of Black communities that had been marginalized or erased by the area’s historians and archival repositories. Our reviewer judges the work a “powerful, poignant reflection on the past and future of Black archives.”

Mark Kawar takes a look at America’s history of getting a little too big for its britches in America, But Bigger: Near Annexations, From Greenland to the Galápagos. The author, our reviewer says, “spotlights a host of forgotten adventurers, eccentrics, and dubious exploits from the nation’s history,” chronicling such fiascos as Southern slaveholders’ efforts to annex Cuba, a congressional act allowing sailors to claim islands rich in guano, and unsuccessful attempts to seize Canadian lands during the War of 1812. Kawar concludes that the U.S. has opted to control “other territories through economic and cultural influences” rather than “pursuing physical acquisition”; one hopes this lesson is not forgotten in our current political climate.

In The Mismeasurement of America, Gene Ludwig paints a bleak portrait of the American dream in its semiquincentennial era, arguing that the standard measurements of such indicators as unemployment, wages, and inflation grossly understate the financial difficulties faced by working- and middle-class Americans. Ludwig asserts that the existing metrics exclude categories that would provide a much more accurate—and disheartening—sense of the widening disparity between the haves and have-nots and of the economic stress felt by everyone outside of the one percent. Our reviewer calls the book a “hard-hitting indictment of the data underpinning federal economic policies.” This is not a book to inspire celebratory chants of “USA! USA!” as we reach the quarter-millennium, but such sober honesty is necessary if we are to last for another 250 years.

Arthur Smith is an Indie editor.