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Jill Lepore
Mixed The New York Times Book Review Much of the book is devoted to describing how nonwhites and disfavored European immigrant groups in previous generations were excluded by illiberal nationalists both from the polity and from mainstream accounts of American history. Lepore makes this familiar material fresh with her attention to Native American nations. She does a public service by drawing her readers to Frederick Douglass’s \'Composite Nation\' address of 1869 ... In contrast, Lepore’s critique of illiberal identity politics is so brief it is easily overlooked ... Her attempt to disentangle good American patriotism from bad American nationalism...tangles American history in knots. Isolationism is nationalist ... But interventionism can be nationalist, too ... Jill Lepore has written a thoughtful and passionate defense of her vision of American patriotism as a purified liberalism. But supporters of American liberal nationalism are unlikely to be persuaded to replace Abraham Lincoln’s belief that America is a nation dedicated to a proposition with the quite different idea that the American nation is nothing but a proposition.
Stephen Kinzer
Pan The New York Times Book Review Kinzer is not content to retell the story of the controversy over annexation of the Philippines. He tries to promote an overarching theory of United States foreign policy ... In this way, the rich detail of Kinzer’s account of the debate over American imperialism at the turn of the 20th century gives way to a hasty revisionist account of United States foreign policy as a series of imperial follies, in which the wars of presidents from Franklin Roosevelt to Barack Obama whiz past. All of American foreign policy for more than a century is attributed to some vague mix of business greed and arrogant folly. Kinzer is free to make this case, but it should not have been tacked on to the conclusion of the book ... Kinzer omits any discussion of the turn-of-the-century rivalries between the United States and other great powers, in the Caribbean, Central America and the Pacific ... The True Flag works better as a history of polemics than as a polemical history.