James Morone is a professor of political science at Brown University and the author of Hellfire Nation: The Politics of Sin in American History (Yale University Press, $35).

Black Reconstruction in America by W.E.B. Du Bois (Simon & Schuster, $20). My candidate for the great American epic. Toss aside your Tocqueville, this is the real deal: A fiery poem wrapped in a sermon and served with sociology. It’s about the South after the Civil War; it’s about the soul of black folks; it’s about poor white people clinging to their whiteness at all costs. Open any page and feel the heat.

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