As the United States marks its semiquincentennial, its finest histories reveal a restless nation unable to escape the foundational neurosis of its own creation. Washington Crossing the Delaware (1851), by Emanuel Leutze. No painting has done more to canonise America’s founding myth. Yet beneath its heroic certainty lies the restless republic that historians from Charles Beard to Robert Kagan would relentlessly question. Behind the fireworks and the dutiful invocations of libe