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“... The current​ territorial shape of the 48 contiguous United States has been fixed since 1853. Nearly a century and a half later, the country’s geographic outline – stretching from coast to coast, with Maine, Florida and Texas sticking out at various angles – is instantly recognisable and so ingrained in our imagination as to seem unquestionable ...”

“... In pre-Civil War​ fugitive slave narratives – memoirs written by men and, occasionally, women who had escaped to freedom and hoped to convert readers to the cause of abolition – the most heart-rending passages described slave auctions and the separation of families that usually ensued. When the abolitionist journalist and underground railroad activist Sydney Howard Gay interviewed fugitives who passed through his office in New York City in the 1850s he found that the threat of sale was a major reason for the decision to run away ...”

“... On​ 22 May 1856, Preston Brooks, a member of the US House of Representatives from South Carolina, strode into the Senate chamber shortly after the daily session had ended. Two days earlier, Charles Sumner, the Senate’s most outspoken critic of slavery, had delivered a five-hour speech, ‘The Crime against Kansas’. Sumner not only denounced the ‘rape’ of Kansas by pro-slavery forces, which had terrorised Northern settlers and sacked the town of Lawrence, but ridiculed Senator Andrew Butler of South Carolina in unusually personal terms, alluding to his speech impediment ...”

“... It seems​ like ages have passed, not just nine months, since the all-consuming public issue in the United States was the impeachment of Donald Trump. The trial was a giant anticlimax, of course, its proceedings lacking witnesses, its outcome predetermined. That Trump remains in the White House reminds us that there is almost no way of unseating an American president, even one manifestly unfit for office ...”

“... Historians,​ public officials and forensic anthropologists are searching for unmarked mass burial sites. Not in Bosnia or Syria but in the United States of America: in Tulsa, Oklahoma, to be precise. The on-again, off-again effort to locate the remains of the victims of the 1921 Tulsa Riot – now known as the Tulsa Race Massacre – is a central theme of The Ground Breaking, a riveting book by Scott Ellsworth, who has spent most of his adult life piecing together the story of perhaps the deadliest instance of racial violence in the country’s history ...”

“... I’m  not a member of an organised political party,’ the American comedian Will Rogers declared. ‘I’m a Democrat.’ When Rogers made this remark, in the early 1930s, the party was just emerging from a decade of disorganisation and defeat. Riven by divisions over Prohibition, immigration, religion and the Ku Klux Klan, Democrats had suffered staggering losses in the presidential elections of the 1920s ...”

“... Between​ 1910 and 1930, more than a million black Americans moved from the rural South to industrial cities north of the Mason-Dixon line. Refugees fleeing grinding poverty, political disenfranchisement, inadequate education and the ever present threat of violence (a comprehensive system of white supremacy known by the shorthand Jim Crow), they found employment on the bottom rungs of the burgeoning industrial economy ...”

“... Abraham Lincoln​ , memorialised as a child of the frontier, self-made man and liberator of the slaves, has been the subject of more than 16,000 books, according to David S. Reynolds’s new biography, Abe. That’s around two a week, on average, since the end of the American Civil War. Almost every possible Lincoln can be found in the historical literature, including the moralist who hated slavery, the pragmatic politician driven solely by ambition, the tyrant who ran roughshod over the Constitution, and the indecisive leader buffeted by events he could not control ...”

“... It hardly qualifies​ as news today that the United States, the world’s foremost economic and military power, suffers from a political and cultural malaise. Americans are deeply sceptical of once well-regarded institutions such as universities, the media and the public health system, and do not trust the functioning of democratic politics. The economy is characterised by entrenched inequality, and intense polarisation between the parties makes it all but impossible to address long-term problems such as climate change ...”

“... the literacy requirement also excluded a considerable number of whites. My father, Jack D. Foner, later the author of a history of Blacks in the military, spent part of the war teaching draftees, mostly from the South, to read and write. I still remember his pleasure after the war at receiving letters from former students thanking him for the ...”

“... During the​ 1950s and 1960s, a generation of academics rose to prominence in the United States with books and essays that breached the wall separating the university and the broader public. Many of them were historians, including Daniel Boorstin, Richard Hofstadter and Arthur Schlesinger Jr. Invocations of history punctuated debates over the Cold War, civil rights and Vietnam ...”

“... Earlier​ this year, Randy McNally, the speaker of the Tennessee Senate, issued a proclamation declaring April 2023 Confederate History Month. He urged ‘citizens from across this state’ to remember their ancestors’ ‘heroic struggle’ for ‘individual freedom’. Observers outside Tennessee may find it incongruous to identify a war fought to preserve slavery with the ideal of freedom, but Jefferson Cowie, who teaches history at Vanderbilt University, in the heart of the state, wouldn’t be surprised ...”

“... Every​ four years Americans wake up to the fact that a president can be elected despite receiving fewer votes than another candidate. Until 2000 the electorate couldn’t be blamed for being unaware of this possibility, because it hadn’t happened since 1888. But twenty years ago George W. Bush squeaked into office with a five vote majority in the electoral college even though Al Gore outpolled him by half a million votes ...”

“... were perceived. Racism entered into the processes by which its own operations were analysed. Eric Foner, who now holds at Columbia University the DeWitt Clinton chair once held by Richard Hofstadter, makes the very interesting point that, as Northern liberals lost heart for and interest in the struggle for racial justice in the South, they found it ...”

“... growing numbers of Americans were thinking of Reconstruction with a new respect.In​ 1988 Eric Foner published Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863-77, a grand narrative built on ground largely cleared of the racist litter left by previous scholars. It is a stupendous scholarly achievement: eloquent, accessible, punctiliously ...”