Recommended: A New Americanism, Why a Nation Needs a National Story

There is an excellent article in the March/April 2019 issue of Foreign Affairs by Harvard historian Jill Lepore entitled A New Americanism, Why a Nation Needs a National Story. I think her argument is right on, especially the comment that if serious historians won't write the national story, it will be written by

"Charlatans, stooges, and tyrants. The endurance of nationalism proves that there’s never any shortage of blackguards willing to prop up people’s sense of themselves and their destiny with a tissue of myths and prophecies, prejudices and hatreds, or to empty out old rubbish bags full of festering resentments and calls to violence. When historians abandon the study of the nation, when scholars stop trying to write a common history for a people, nationalism doesn’t die. Instead, it eats liberalism."