It’s hard for Americans to stay home. We are all descended from people who traveled thousands of miles to get here, freely or in chains. We have 205,000 miles of U.S. highways and interstates. A lot of us can recall our own versions of what Simon and Garfunkel first sang in 1968: “It took me four days to hitchhike from Saginaw. I’ve gone to look for America.”

This is the time of year when a lot of us would like to be on the road, again. But, given the coronavirus, it might not be time, yet. If we can’t be out and about, is the next best thing reading about those who were?

“All right we are two nations,” John Dos Passos concluded in his 1936 novel about wealth and poverty, The Big Money. Events during the two weeks concluding on June 8 showed that’s true about the disunited states today, although the divide at street level is not so much rich vs. poor but protected-from-consequences vs. exposed, and tired-of-harassment vs. tired-of-chastisement. 

Now that the May 28–June 1 looting orgy in many cities is in our rearview mirror, but calls to abolish police forces are in front of us, we can take time to ponder some historical experience. I’m fascinated that Vox progressive Jane Coastan and The Dispatch conservative David French agree that we need to “curtail the power of police unions”—and it’s even more interesting that The New York Times and Calvin Coolidge agree with them.

We’re publishing a monthly series of “stump speeches” I’ve given over the last 25 years. Last month, it was a talk I gave about Andrew Jackson and peer pressure. In April, we posted my speech about how concerns over corrupt Anglicanism helped spur American colonists to revolt. Here’s one I gave at a conference hosted by the Jonathan Edwards Institute on July 6, 1999.

This week, in the wake of George Floyd’s killing and the demonstrations that followed, I’ve received letters asking for reading recommendations. Here are my top 10 picks of books to improve our understanding of racial relations, followed by my top 10 African-American history books. 

• Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man: 1952 novel deservedly on many “best 20th century American novels” lists.

• Booker T. Washington’s Up From Slavery: A classic autobiography showing perseverance under pressure. 

''Cry, the beloved country, for the unborn child that is the inheritor of our fear. Let him not … stand too silent when the setting sun makes red the veld with fire.”

A reader of our May 9 feature about books on China asked for a similar reading list about Russia. Keeping this to one page, here are six good books from the past seven years: