A vital account of fifteen speeches and orators—from Benjamin Franklin to Barack Obama—that tells the story of the United States as a battle for the American identity from a New York Times bestselling author and former presidential speechwriter

Since the founding of the United States, we have declared, discussed, and debated what it means to be an American. This deceptively simple question has spawned Constitutional crises, civil war, populism, mass migrations, reform movements—and their inevitable backlash. The history of this discourse over who we are, Ben Rhodes argues, is essential to understanding how we have evolved as a nation and the intensity of our divisions today.

Rhodes tells the story of fifteen essential speeches—some famous, some obscure—that, together, offer a fresh and revealing portrait of the United States. With rare insight into the power and purpose of political rhetoric, Rhodes illuminates how each speech reflects the nature of American identity at a particular historical moment, with riveting accounts of the people, movements, and social conditions that produced pivotal oratory. Rhodes also establishes the unique role of speaking as an act of American political persuasion—from Franklin’s case for compromise at the Constitutional convention to Alexander Stephens’s case for white supremacy as the cornerstone of the Confederacy; or, in social movements, from Martin Luther King, Jr.’s demand for racial equality at the march on Washington, to Pat Buchanan’s “culture war” speech at the 1992 Republican convention which foreshadowed Donald Trump. For a country that values individualism, self-invention, and mass media, Rhodes reminds us that speeches have occupied an outsized space in our national imagination: the lone voice before a crowd, bending history to its will.

At a time when what it means to be an American is a matter of intense polarization, A History of the United States in 15 Speeches offers rare insight into the gap between who we really we are and who we want to be.