A Different Mirror

by Ronald Takaki

American history. All of it. Everyone who lived it.

For you if

you want the full American story told by everyone who built it not just the people who wrote about it

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Takaki was a third-generation Japanese American historian who spent his career asking a simple question: what does American history look like when you tell it from the perspective of everyone who lived it — not just the white Protestant men who wrote the official version? The answer spans Irish immigrants, Black slaves, Chinese railroad workers, Mexican farmworkers, Japanese internees, Indigenous nations — each group's story told in their own words where possible, woven into a single narrative that is recognizably American and completely unlike the history most Americans were taught. The most comprehensive multicultural history of the United States ever written for a general audience. The book that makes the standard American history curriculum look like the selective mythology it always was.

Where This Book Lives