America! Yours in 592 pages.

• Author: Ellis, Joseph
• Position: America, Empire of Liberty: A New History of the United States - Book review

David Reynolds, America, Empire of Liberty: A New History of the United States (New York: Basic Books, 2009), 592 pp., $35.00.

Let us not mince words. In my judgment, this is the best one-volume history of the United States ever written. To be sure, not many such books are written anymore, mainly because historians have sliced and diced the American past into increasingly smaller segments, the monograph aimed at fellow specialists is the preferred scholarly vehicle, and textbooks covering all of American history are usually multiauthor affairs in which each contributor focuses on his or her designated piece of the chronological terrain.

David Reynolds, author of tomes such as One World Divisible, In Command of History and Rich Relations, on the other hand, begins his story with the migration of Mongolian tribes across the Bering Strait around 12000 BC and ends it with the election of Barack Obama in 2008. Lots of history happened between these dates, of course, and thousands of historians have written millions of pages about--let's see--the meaning of the American Revolution, the embedded cancer that was slavery, the causes and consequences of the Civil War, the emergence of America as a world power, the Great Depression and New Deal, the two World Wars, the Cold War, the civil-rights movement, the Vietnam War, the Reagan Revolution, the War on Terror and the Great Recession. And this, let it be noted, is a highly selective list.

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At least on the face of it, no single mind can master this mountain of material, avoid the almost-inevitable factual blunders, negotiate the long-standing scholarly controversies, and control the narrative in clear and at-times-lyrical prose. But that is precisely what Reynolds has done.

Here, for example, is the sure-handed Reynolds's treatment of three highly contested pieces of historical turf, each of which is littered with the dead bodies of historians who preceded him. First, on James Madison's role at the Constitutional Convention:

Madison was not an obvious leader. Five foot six and sickly, usually dressed in black and often cripplingly shy, he looked like a diffident schoolmaster. But on the debating floor "little Jimmy Madison" was a match for anyone--crisp, fluent, yet disarmingly diffident--and he also had a plan. Madison did not want to tinker with the existing Confederation. A few extra teeth would do little for a body that lacked brawn or brain. He wanted to turn this...