Heather Cox Richardson takes a stab at understanding the current state of the U.S. by tracing our history of falling short of our stated ideals of equality and justice for all. For Richardson, the core document is the Declaration of Independence, an audacious rejection of monarchy in favor of the notion that members of a nation should choose their own government rather than relying on a natural aristocracy to govern it. But the founders’ vision stopped short of including so many living inside the boundaries of the new nation: women, indigenous people, and enslaved people, for a start, and men without property were also excluded from full citizenship. Americans have fought to rectify these exclusions since 1776, and been opposed by those willing to manipulate language and history—she refuses to say “lie” and “propagandize,” for some reason—to hold fast to their electoral and economic advantages. The structure of this book is somewhat problematic; chapters revisit the same parts of history over and over again to support the themes, which was dizzying for this historian. But Richardson has many fresh things to say, if no prescriptions.