Alexandra Petri's US History: Important American Documents

by Alexandra Petri

“Satire at the highest level.… [A] godsend of a book.” —Amy Fusselman, Washington Post



A witty, absurdist satire of the last 500 years, Alexandra Petri’s US History is the fake textbook you never knew you needed!


As a columnist for the Washington Post, Alexandra Petri has watched in real time as those who didn’t learn from history have been forced to repeat it. And repeat it. And repeat it. If we repeat history one more time, we’re going to fail! Maybe it’s time for a new textbook.


Alexandra Petri’s US History contains a lost (invented!) history of America. (A history for people disappointed that the only president whose weird sex letters we have is Warren G. Harding.) Petri’s "historical fan fiction" draws on real events and completely absurd fabrications to create a laugh-out-loud, irreverent takedown of our nation’s complicated past.


On Petri’s deranged timeline, John and Abigail Adams try sexting, the March sisters from Little Women are sixty feet tall, and Susan Sontag goes to summer camp. Nearly eighty short, hilarious pieces span centuries of American history and culture. Ayn Rand rewrites The Little Engine That Could. Nikola Tesla’s friends stage an intervention when he falls in love with a pigeon. The characters from Sesame Street invade Normandy. And Mark Twain—who famously said reports of his death had been greatly exaggerated—offers a detailed account of his undeath, in which he becomes a zombie.


This side-splitting work of historical humor shows why Alexandra Petri has been hailed as a "genius,"* a "national treasure,"† and "one of the funniest writers alive"‡.


*Olivia Nuzzi, Katha Pollitt

†Julia Ioffe, Katy Tur, John Scalzi, Chuck Wendig, Jamil Smith, and Susan Hennessey

‡Randall Munroe

Genres: Humor, History, Nonfiction, Politics, Essays, Comedy, Historical

339 pages, Kindle Edition

First published April 11, 2023

About the author

My new book is AP's US HISTORY: Important American Documents (I Made Up) and it comes out April 11, just in time for someone to make a horrible mistake in studying for the AP exam! This is my best wild spin on the book of documents -- sermons, poems, Federalist Papers -- that you were handed in high school and asked to write essays about, and I hope that it will make you laugh and be unable to see the Cross Of Gold speech the same way. If you like Raymond Chandler, spiders, the Muppets, horrifying 1950s gelatin dishes, or wonder what Little Women would have been like if the March sisters were 60 feet tall, this is the book for you!

I also wrote NOTHING IS WRONG AND HERE IS WHY, A FIELD GUIDE TO AWKWARD SILENCES, an issue of She-Hulk (Annual #1) and some other things! I write plays regularly, and am very slowly working on a new one.

I live in DC, without a cat, which surprises me too!

Reviews

[Sean Gibson · Rating 5 out of 5]

A brilliant high concept superbly executed. Almost as funny as the word "hamberder."

[Caroline Johnson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reading this book in a library is a sure-fire way to get kicked out of said library.
...
When I say that this book made me laugh, I mean it made me CACKLE... Loud, obnoxious cackling. Tears-in-my-eyes cackling.
Somewhere between "How to Pose for Your Civil War Photo" and "Ernest Hemingway's The Great Gatsby" I had to put the book down to wipe my eyes and catch my breath. Still, I endeavored on through this collection of shorts that can best be described as educated silliness. It was a joy to read, even if I am now slightly scarred from Cookie Monster's untimely death on D-Day.

[Renata · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm a fan of Alexandra Petri's online humor, and these were all very funny little pieces. I think the effect kind of wanes as you read it, like, to me it's funnier in small doses and often I would end up skimming like "OK I get the joke." I feel like some of these might be very fun to use in high school history classes.

[David Wineberg · Rating 4 out of 5]

(Full disclosure:) As I have noted with very few other authors, I confess I am a fan of Alexandra Petri. Anything she writes is worth reading for me. Alexandra Petri’s US History is no exception. From George Washington to Donald Trump, it tags and warps notable Americans (in chronological order), in short essays torturing their records and characters.


In a very fast reading 320 pages, Petri turns the US on its head, recognizing the styles of its leading characters, mocking them (mostly) gently, and demonstrating a comfort with -what were we even thinking when we elected them.


The stories are short (one has no words beyond the title), column-sized snippets in the life of historical people and events. There are plenty of laughs for pretty much anyone enmeshed in American pop culture and history.


The skewering is not limited to mere presidents. Petri simulates what an Ayn Rand children’s storybook would read like. What if Emily Dickinson called in to chat with Tech Support. William F. Buckley and Gore Vidal reprise their painfully pompous debates, over nothing. There’s also an examination of why civil war photographs are so sad looking, and of Modern Etiquette – 1871 edition, which instructs that for evening ball seasons, redheaded debutantes must shelter in a root cellar. Not terribly far from the truth.


Sadly, a lot of it will be wasted. Readers will have to have read Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, Carl Sandburg, Allen Ginsburg and Hunter Thompson to get their chapters in this book. But readers will have no problem understanding Top Toys for Puritan Parents, John and Abigail Adams Sexting, and Edgar Allen Poe’s Handyman.


The biggest groan comes in the Upton Sinclair chapter, demolishing The Jungle, his epic novel excoriating the meatpacking industry. When the hero Jurgis dies, she says “Jurgis’s funeral was small but not lacking in taste.” Ugh.


I was having difficulty picking a favorite, when I found myself laughing out loud at The Team at Build-A-Bear Respond on the Thirteenth Anniversary of 9/11. In its mere two pages, it manages to demolish modern marketing, self-important managers, social media, corporate hubris, lack of empathy and internet memes with devastating simplicity and elegance. The clear winner.


But there’s also Exclamation Point!, the untold history of Richard Rogers’ obsession with them against the saner notions of Oscar Hammerstein and everyone else he ever worked with. Lynn Riggs, out of whose story Oklahoma! developed, commented that she thought it might have better to call it Oklahoma? – but nobody asked her.

Alexandra Petri’s US History is fluff, stuff and nonsense, in delightful, digestible doses.


David Wineberg


(Alexandra Petri’s US History, Alexandra Petri, April 2023)


If you liked this review, I invite you to read more in my book The Straight Dope. It’s an essay collection based on my first thousand reviews and what I learned. Right now it’s FREE for Prime members, otherwise — cheap! Reputed to be fascinating and a superfast read. And you already know it is well-written. https://www.amazon.com/Straight-Dope-...

[Kendell Timmers · Rating 5 out of 5]

Have to give this 5 stars because it made me snort-laugh on a commuter train, causing my seat mate to find another spot.

Lots of great, memorable stuff in here, and the Shirley Temple/Shirley Jackson mashup proves that Petri is not just a good comic writer - she’s just a damn good writer.

Small caveat for those who are pure history buffs - this is really half AP US History and half AP American Lit. So if you’re not well- read on American authors, some of this may be not as funny.

[Barb in Maryland · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars
Somewhat uneven, as most books of short pieces tend to be. But the good bits definitely outnumbered the duds.
I really enjoyed the literature send-ups, as I was familiar with most of the works being skewered.
The more politically slanted ones were hit or miss for me.
This is not a book to read straight through, but rather should be dipped into as the mood strikes.
I am a fan of Petri's weekly column (via The Washington Post), so I was already familiar with her style and tone of voice. I am glad I picked this up, because when she's good, she's very, very good.

[Mike · Rating 3 out of 5]

I adore Alexandra Petri, she is a goddamned gift from the gods of satire. Every one of her columns are both hilarious and cutting, perfectly balanced satire. I highly recommend everyone read all of her columns, especially her column on why every state flag is bad (The Washington Post, in some short sighted intention of saving money on server space, opted not to keep the flags in this 2015 post. Read the column with a picture of all the state flags handy, it enhances the experience). I am proudly a Petri stan.

Which makes it so tough to rate this book at only 3 stars. But the fact is some types of humor are best consumed in small batches and just don't work when extended over 200+ pages. Additionally some of the chapters referenced literature I was not familiar with, making the no doubt brilliant satirical take of them fall on an ignorant mind.

This isn't to say there were not many, many excellent sections (there were), but simply that this is probably the type of book best suited to small reads over a long period of time. It would make a good coffee book that is enjoyed for 10 minutes here, fifteen minutes there, not an extended reading session.

So if you do pick this up, take time to slowly savor it, draw the experience out over a few weeks or use it as a short palette cleanser between other reads.

[Steve Lawler · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: Alexandra Petri is a national treasure. This book is just as smart and funny as I hoped it would be.

[Cookie M. · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read Petri's column in the Washington Post (Fake News) whenever I can, so I was delighted to win an ARC of her new book. She makes writing about history look so easy. You just take a famous incident and you make stuff up about it. Brilliant! Some of these chapters had me laughing out loud, some had me wishing the events had happened the way she described them.
Me favorite was the chapter on weird recipes from the 1950s. She obviously looked at the faded photos from some of my mom's 1950's cooking pamphlets and extrapolated from there. The conversation between the early astronauts' wives is another favorite.
Thanks to Goodreads and W.W. Norton & Company for sending me a copy of this book.
Also, thanks to Alexandra Petri for doing a better job at rewriting American history than Florida and Texas have.

[Emma · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 stars. Alexandra Petri once said that her comedic philosophy is to be weirder than everyone else. This collection, a miscellany of spoofed US history-based shorts, shows her ability to pull the joke out of any real-life situation, but also that she is pretty dang weird. Her remixes range from an attempt to give the Federalist Papers the fanfic treatment to the pseudoerotic, recurring “50 States of Grey” to an account of Mark Twain’s zombification that actually sounds shockingly like him. Your opinion on this will probably be related to how many of the references you understand, but you’ll still get a kick out of the ones you don’t.

[Dana · Rating 4 out of 5]

Laugh out loud funny. A great take on US history and literature.

[sasha · Rating 4 out of 5]

NUMBER 75 BABYYYY

This was such a fun read: first half was definitely stronger, the jokes were punchier and felt fresher, but the second was still very enjoyable. For every joke where I already knew the historical reference, they were funny. But for the ones that I didn't, I would read the section, then go wikipedia deepdive on that topic, then reread and each bit always landed even harder.

My favourites:
The 50 States of Grey, John and Abigal Adams Try Sexting, We're the Rhinoceroses Trying to Keep Teddy Roosevelt's Life Together, Nikola Tesla's Friends Intervene (a Powerpoint), The Night They Came Up with All the Currency, The Sun Maid Correspondance, Notes on Camp, by Susan Sontag, Aged Fifteen, Camp Winnebago, Nancy Reagan's Psychic's Daily Horoscopes Once She Realized They Were Being Used to Set Policy, The Team at Build-A-Bear Responds on the Thirteenth Anniversary of 9/11, and MOST OF ALL, D-Day: A Very Special Sesame Street Episode.

[Rebecca · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm not quite sure how to review this - it's an insane lampooning of American history and literature, full of gems like "Ernest Hemingway's The Great Gatsby," an explanation of Oklahoma!'s exclamation mark, and a white woman named Karen explaining Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech to him. Come for the discussion of how using the tune to a crummy drinking song for a national anthem will never happen, stay for "Ragnarok in the Hall of Presidents." It's nuts - in a good way.

[🐴 🍖]

'sok! kinda wanted to hate bc blurbed by the professionally obtuse, richard-spencer-smooching julia ioffe, but def RIYL e.g. mike sacks. emily dickinson playing taboo & teenage susan sontag penning her "notes on [summer] camp" stood head & shoulders above everything else in here.

[Laura]

My interview with the author: https://www.historians.org/research-a...

[Elle · Rating 5 out of 5]

what a fun read! I’ve definitely gotta read more satire and humor like this

[Jessica · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was so excited for this book but found it a little disappointing. It has kinda the SNL problem where there's so much space to fill that not all the bits land. Some of the stuff I didn't get. Some was a hilarious premise that didn't go much farther. Some of it was solid gold brilliance, like the Walt Whitmanesque version of Barbie Girl.

[Synful · Rating 2 out of 5]

I rated this 2 stars because while I would think a 2 isn't good, apparently at Goodreads it means "it was ok." My lukewarm feeling about it is partially to blame from my own expectations which I don't normally like to use as a gauge. How I feel about the subject of what I'm reading isn't necessarily the best reason for rating the quality of the book. I almost wanted to give it a 3, but I feel that my expectations were made by the title of the book, the summary on it, and reviews/blurbs I saw of it.

I'm a history junkie and I always love me a good satire in general and definitely about the high and mighty PR campaigns of U.S. history. Going by those summaries and the book title, I thought this was going to be a satire of U.S. history. There was some of that and it did make me chuckle or even a laugh here and there, but there wasn't enough of that to warrant what you would think from something subtitled "American documents" with cover art of Washington crossing the Delaware.

I believe that this book would be more appreciated by English majors born after 1985. A lot of the "documents" are take offs of authors/writers you'd probably have to read or cover as an English major. If you've not read their work, you don't have a basis for understanding what's funny about what's in this book about it. As for the humor, I said the above because while I appreciate the type of humor it uses, it is the type used by people from that generation and I've never particularly cared for it.

So, while I don't think it's not good, I don't think this book is for me and not what I was looking for in my light reading. YMMV.

[Brandon Westlake · Rating 5 out of 5]

What an amazingly funny, nerdy, historical book (in that order). I am always suspicious of how someone can legitimately turn history into a gut-buster but Petri provides the example that others should follow. If you're not at least giving an outloud chuckle to the Adams' long distance sexting, then I surely don't expect your to find humor in the Sesame Street version of D-Day.

I'd love to give some of the tamer ones to my students and see just how befuddled they get by them, for my own schadenfreude-ish motives.

My only suggestion would be to include some more recent history, but I understand the closer you get to contemporary times, the more likely you're going to be pissing someone off. The potential humor of George W. Bush, Trump, and Howard Dean would be worth it, though

I can say I always am aware of how great I consider a book by how I would imagine a sequel or follow-up. In this case, I hope there is a second semester.

If I'm scoring this according to College Bored (no typo there) rubrics, this gets a 5. Petri dominated the Long Essay Question.

[Angie Boyter · Rating 3 out of 5]

⁰This was on my Currently Reading list for quite a while, not because I was not enjoying it, but because it is a nice read for when you have a few minutes, since it is a bunch of short and sometimes delightful pieces.
I had not heard of it until the author came to talk at my local library. She opened her session by reading a "draft" of The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere where the poet tried to include Samuel Prescott but could not because his name doesn't rhyme with anything. That gives you a sense of the book!!
What can be better than a book that makes you laugh AND makes you think?
HOWEVER the appeal of the various pieces varied tremendously , from bery funny to total duds for my taste. The enjoymemt also depended very much on what I remembered about the topic of that piece. Fortunately at worst I could just skip to the next. I tended to like the earlier pieces more.

[Socraticgadfly · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not that funny.

Oh, the overall concept is, but most the individual pieces are clunkers, at least from what I saw before ending early. There were enough bits here and that were 3- or 4-star that the book as a whole got 2 and not 1.

And, if Ms. Petri is a humor columnist for the Washington Post, there's some serious Peter Principle, or possession of negatives, going on. And, that's sarcastic, not satirical, but also serious, and uttered professionally. As an editor, I wouldn't run most stuff like this.

[Molly · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fun book by and author who clearly loves American history and literature. My favorite “documents”:

-John and Abigail Adams Try Sexting
-Songs Not of Myself, by Walt Whitman
-How to Pose for Your Civil War Photograph
-Nikola Tesla’s Friends Intervene (A PowerPoint)
-The Team At Build-A-Bear Responds on the Thirteenth Anniversary of 9/11
-Ragnarok In the Hall of Presidents

[Stephanie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Diminishing returns as you progress through the book

[Catie Currie · Rating 1 out of 5]

I thought I would like this based on some satire I read by the author elsewhere but it wasn't my thing at all, I felt irritated the whole time I read it

[Lindsey · Rating 4 out of 5]

✨ Review ✨ Alexandra Petri's US History: Important American Documents (I Made Up) by Alexandra Petri; Narrated by Alexandra Petri

This book was peak silliness that this historian was cackling over. I loved the Alexandra narrated it too since it brought in even more emotion and silliness galore.

In this AP (Alexandra Petri) US History book, which she apologizes to any teens who accidentally pick up this book to study from 😂, she presents a slew of fake primary sources related to important figures in US History. There were so many funny moments here - John and Abigail Adams sexting via letter across the Atlantic (they kept losing count of how many petticoats she had left to take over!), a suffragist Hallmark movie story in Seneca Falls, notes on why our currency looks as it does, Little Women rewritten as 60-feet-tall women, and so many silly documents.

There's a great range of style and medium of these documents, which I appreciated, and some of them had me laughing out loud. I do think that it felt a little repetitive by the end -- there's only so much you can listen to / read in one sitting, and some of them, you really needed some base historical or cultural knowledge to get the joke, which left me skipping to the next track.

I also was left uncomfortable both by the few places where she did write satire from a BIPOC perspective, but at the same time disappointed that this depicts a mostly-white history. If this were an actual history, I feel like I'd have a clearer take on this, but as satire, ultimately, I felt a little dissatisfied, even if I'm not sure what the "fix" should have been.

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️(3.75 stars)
Genre: humor, satire, history, politics
Setting: United States
Pub Date: 29 Aug 2023

Read this if you like:
⭕️ laughing at US history & literature
⭕️ just laughing in general

Thanks to HighBridge Audio and #netgalley for an advanced e-copy of this book!

[Antoniette · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is a unique collection of comedic sketches that pokes fun at US history and famous historical figures.

This book was a mixed bag for me. There were parts that made me crack a smile, parts that went over my head, and parts that had me laughing so hard I was wiping tears from my face (namely the Emily Dickinson segments). This is definitely a book written for US history and literature buffs as they will likely understand the references.

I highly recommend potential readers consider the audiobook edition of this book. The author narrates the audiobook herself which adds a great deal of energy to the humor.

Thank you NetGalley for allowing me early access to the ARC audiobook edition of this book in exchange for my honest opinion.

[Rachel-RN · Rating 4 out of 5]

OMG! This was HILARIOUS! A.P. takes events from US History and makes shit up. Or I should say, reimagines it. Most of those were LOL hilarious. I liked that she took from various time periods and no one was safe.
A few favorites; "John and Abigail Adams "sexting" (My Dearest Friend)," "Edgar Allan Poe's handyman," "50 States of Grey," the "American Girl" parody with Edith Wharton, and 1950s recipes.

[mikaela (spinebreaker) · Rating 5 out of 5]

FIVE STARS, NO NOTES, ONLY 30ISH HIGHLIGHTS WHERE I LAUGHED UPROARIOUSLY

although you'll enjoy this more if you're a history fan (full disclosure, I am), there's enough of a short background paragraph for the more obscure chapters that you'll still get it and be entertained

[Katrina]

I liked Alexandra Petri’s columns when I subscribed to Washington Post but a whole book of her essays was too much.

[Jacob Vahle · Rating 5 out of 5]

Laughed my way through every single page. Hilarious takes on “primary source documents”. How she came up with these is beyond me!


Chapters to read again:
Colombian Exchange Returns Department
A Spider Objects to Jonathan Edwards
Seneca Falls for You: A Hallmark Movie
Edgar Allan Poe’s Handyman Finds the Real Problem in all the Houses
How to Pose for Your Civil War Photograph
The Jungle, but even more Heavyhanded
The WasteCat, and Other Suppressed Poems by TS Eliot
D-Day: A Very Special Seasame Street Episode
Any Rand’s Little Engine That Could But Prefferred Not To
A Confused Fan Asks Why There Is No Mockingbird in To Kill A Movkingbird
A Dream Interpreter Interprets MLK’s Dream
The Team at Build a Bear Posts a Tribute on the Thirteenth Anniversary of 9/11