Alexandra Petri's US history: important American documents (I made up)

Introduction

Dear King Charles, I have no doubts about this golden city and I will write you as soon as I am back from it bearing tons of gold

Columbian exchange returns

Would you describe yourselves as normal Europeans? A survey for new arrivals

Naming places on this continent: a template

Top toys for Puritan parents

Cotton Mather: spirit hunter

A spider objects to Jonathan Edwards

Listen my children and you shall hear of the midnight ride of Paul Revere and also Samuel Prescott who was there too even if his name doesn't rhyme as well

The hour men

50 statues of grey: liberty or death

John and Abigail Adams try sexting

An oral history of the Constitutional Convention

The original plan for the Federalist Papers

50 statues of grey: Bill of rights

The composing of "To anacreon in heaven", c. 1778

Seneca Falls for you

50 statues of grey: Henry Clay

Excerpt from Modern Etiquette (1793 edition)

A speech in favor of constructing the Eerie Canal that got pretty far along before the speaker realized Erie starts with only one E

Where's Walden?

Emily Dickinson content!!!

Edgar Allen Poe's handyman

Herman Melville pitches his editor

The Scarlet Letter, abridged

50 statues of grey: Northwest Passage

Moby Dick: an oral history

Songs Not of Myself, by Walt Whitman

How to pose for your Civil War photograph

The Gettysburg Address, by Aaron Sorkin

But other than that how was the play? Audience feedback for "Our American Cousin"

Big women

Excerpt from Modern Etiquette (cursed 1871 edition)

Mark Twain's undeath

Branding session for the corrupt bargain of 1877

Nikola Tesla's friends intervene (a PowerPoint)

Other Edison ideas

Nellie Bly reviews Blackwell's Island

50 statues of grey: Benjamin Harrison

The Yellow Wallpaper guy tries to get a refund

L. Frank Baum's dystopian YA novel

The group telegram following the "Cross of gold" speech

We're the rhinoceroses trying to keep Teddy Roosevelt's life together

Why the National Parks were set aside

The Jungle, basically

The Dollhouse of Mirth: limited edition American Girl Dolls by Edith Wharton

Other Carl Sandburg poems

A new American tall tale

The Waste Cat and other suppressed T.S. Eliot poems

Teapot Dome excuses

Ernest Hemingway's The Great Gatsby

50 statues of grey: stock market

Frank Lloyd Wright is here to design your home

The Classic American Songbook

An oral history of the Oklahoma! exclamation point

The only thing we have to fear is fear itself, and the thing that ate Herbert Hoover, by Franklin Delano Roosevelt

D-Day: a very special Sesame Street episode

The Lady in the Sexual Harassment Seminar, by Raymon Chandler

Julia Child's cookbook that made it much clearer she was a spy

Shirley Temple Jackson

Witch Play Written in the 1950s as a Metaphor, by Arthur Miller

What if they Censored Books, and it was Bad, by Ray Bradbury

1950s recipes

Other McCarthy lists

Two pages of Catcher in the Rye that were removed before publication but maybe shouldn't have been

Giovanni's Escape Room

50 statues of grey: gerrymandering

Allen Ginsberg's Howl (original dog draft)

The night they came up with all the currency

The Sun-Maid correspondence

Ayn Rand's The Little Engine that Could but Preferred Not To

Real Housewives of the Space Program, 1959

Re: the mockingbird

What your dream means!!!

Notes on Camp, by Susan Sontag, aged fifteen, Camp Winnebago

In Cold Blood if Truman Capote didn't think the murderer guy was kind of hot

Buckley and Vidal debate other things

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, the draft where Hunter S. Thompson forgot to bring any drugs

Richard Nixon tapes but just the parts where he's yelling at checkers

1970s urban legends

Nancy Reagan's psychic's daily horoscopes once she realized they were being used to set policy

50 statues of grey: Laffer curves

Fairy Tales, by Tom Wolfe

The team at Build-a-Bear responds on the thirteenth anniversary of 9/11

Ragnarok in the hall of presidents.