Gallery: Books to celebrate the Fourth of July

The author's intention is to highlight the men and women, prominent and unknown, whose labor and vision shaped our nation's values. According to the description posted on Amazon, it is "an in-depth portrait of the American people that covers all aspects of American history, from politics to the arts."

This book is written in Spanish. It's English title would be "United States against United States." The character of Mario Vargas Llosa wondered, in very prosaic terms, when things began to go wrong in Peru. His son Álvaro writes the preface to this book, in which economist Alberto Benegas Lynch makes a critical appraisal of the country's history, and asks the same question, but about the United States.

The decline of the country is that of the principles of freedom that inspired its Constitution. Those ideals have been replaced by others. The most notable consequence is the increase in the power of the federal government, the growing intervention in the lives of citizens and the emergence of otherwise less serious conflicts. The decline of the republican ideal goes hand in hand with the decline of liberties.

But this is not a hopeless and pessimistic book. As a man of ideas, Benegas Lynch cannot help but be optimistic.

The United States is a unique case, in which the name of a country tells a part of its history; the fundamental, founding part. It was once a group of colonies that become independent from the metropolis, constituted itself into states and united. The United States they are, certainly.

This union was made in the form of a confederation, and later with the current federal Constitution. What were the ideas that animated the rebellion? What were the ideas that led to drafting the Constitution most identified with the ideal of freedom?

Many have tried to explain it, but probably none has surpassed Bernard Baylin. This book won the Pulitzer Prize and the Bancroft Prize. It has the advantage that the exposition of ideas is very systematic. An alternative is "The Radicalism of American Revolution" by Gordon S. Wood (Vintage, New York, 1993).

This work reconstructs the history of the country with a very clear ideological vision: a defense of the American republic and democracy, of the market economy, of the rule of law and of Protestantism.

The authors make this clear in the opening pages, and the reading of the rest does not disappoint in this sense. None of this detracts from the value of this book, copious in information and rich in subtle and well-stated historical judgments.

In addition, Schweikart and Allen offer aspects of the country's history that have not been emphasized by many other authors, but which are important.

History and conflict go hand in hand. In fact, the great political problem is the existence of conflicts within society, and how to solve them, or at least channel them. But it is not always possible.

A clear example is the American Civil War. Slavery, that "peculiar institution" that accompanied the first nine decades of the country's history, is one of the issues that led to the confrontation between North and South. But there were other elements as well.

There are hundreds of books dedicated to explaining this conflict, but very few are as good as this one. In just over 400 pages, it recounts not only the forces that led to the conflict, but the way in which the war profoundly transformed the country.

This is a brief, well-written history of the United States that offers some very good keys to understanding the country's past. There are several books that meet this description, but none like the one written in 2009 by Robert V. Remini. An expert on the 19th century, especially its early part, Remini's book is a history of the House of Representatives.

Remini wrote this work with remarkable objectivity and sense of history. What the reader loses by not having that ideological interpretation of the past, he gains with the unbiased perspective. The relevant facts acquire the sense given to them by the historical figures in the book. Although his interpretation of the 20th century drops a notch above the 19th, it is still a great book to start with.

Who is the best president of the United States? Historians' lists are topped by Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, Harry S. Truman... And Warren G. Harding? Harding usually appears near the bottom of the list, but in this collective work, edited by the eminent historian John V. Denson, he occupies the top spot.

Why? Because the book chooses very different criteria from usual lists. It does not look at the great conflicts, the major government programs, the aggrandizement of federal power. Instead, it looks at the ability of presidents to return power to the citizens. That is why Harding ranks first, and why Abraham Lincoln is last.

But this is no mere list in which the usual villains are the heroes and the usual heroes take the opposite place. This 800-page book contains several very careful, in-depth essays on the institution of the presidency.

This book is also written in Spanish. Its English title would be "Distant Flags: Spain's Exploration, Conquest and Defense of the Territory of the Present-day United States." Two-thirds of the current territory of the United States once belonged to Spain. The Spanish legacy is very important, and goes far beyond Bernardo de Gálvez, Fray Junípero Serra and Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca.

The dollar itself is Spanish. Long before the conquest of the West was done in English, it had been done in Spanish, with a presence of the language for almost 300 years, more time than has passed from the Declaration of Independence to the present.

This aspect of the country's history is largely unknown, but now is the time to learn.