America at 250: Historical Fiction, Alternate Histories, and the American Imagination
by Librarian Lynn Lampert, Coordinator of Instruction & Information Literacy - July 01, 2026
As we near celebrating America’s 250th birthday, The Book Drop invites you to consider the following titles from the shelves of the Gohstand Reading Room for your leisure reading. America's 250th birthday deserves celebration and invites deep reflection. These recommended titles all use imagined or reconstructed versions of the American past to allow readers to examine our nation’s ideals, failures, and possibilities. Some of these titles offer complete alternative and revisionist histories, while others commit to recreating what living in a particular time would have felt like. These selected novels remind us that history and historical fiction offer more than a record of what happened, they also can be a conversation about what might have happened, what should have happened, and what still could happen from the perspectives of different Americans and their cultural heritages. By imagining alternate and diverse visions of America and American lives through fiction, readers can appreciate America’s history, achievements and unfinished work. These books offer both great reading, not just for a commemoration of 250 years, but also for thinking about the next 250 years plus that hopefully lie ahead.
To Paradise by Hanya Yanagihara
Gohstand Reading Room: PS3625.A674 T62 2022
Spanning three centuries and three different versions of the American experiment, an unforgettable cast of characters are united by their reckonings with the qualities that make us human—fear, love, shame, need, and loneliness.
Summary: "In an alternate version of 1893 America, New York is part of the Free States, where people may live and love whomever they please (or so it seems). The fragile young scion of a distinguished family resists betrothal to a worthy suitor, drawn to a charming music teacher of no means. In a 1993 Manhattan besieged by the AIDS epidemic, a young Hawaiian man lives with his much older, wealthier partner, hiding his troubled childhood and the fate of his father. And in 2093, in a world riven by plagues and governed by totalitarian rule, a powerful scientist's damaged granddaughter tries to navigate life without him—and solve the mystery of her husband's disappearances. These three sections are joined in an enthralling and ingenious symphony, as recurring notes and themes deepen and enrich one another: A townhouse in Washington Square Park in Greenwich Village; illness, and treatments that come at a terrible cost; wealth and squalor; the weak and the strong; race; the definition of family, and of nationhood; the dangerous righteousness of the powerful, and of revolutionaries; the longing to find a place in an earthly paradise, and the gradual realization that it can't exist. What unites not just the characters, but these Americas, are their reckonings with the qualities that make us human: Fear. Love. Shame. Need. Loneliness" (Publisher's description).
The Underground Railroad by Coleson Whitehead
Gohstand Reading Room: PS3573.H4768 U53 2016
Summary: “'Set in antebellum America, Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize winning book envisions the Underground Railroad not as a network of abolitionists and safe houses, but as an actual train, with subterranean stations staffed by covert activists snaking north to freedom' (Smithsonian Magazine). Cora is a slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia. When Caesar, a recent arrival from Virginia, tells her about the Underground Railroad, they decide to take a terrifying risk and escape. Though they manage to find a station and head north, they are being hunted. Their first stop is South Carolina, in a city that initially seems like a haven. But the city's placid surface masks an insidious scheme designed for its black denizens. And even worse: Ridgeway, the relentless slave catcher, is close on their heels. Forced to flee again, Cora embarks on a harrowing flight, state by state, seeking true freedom" (Publisher's description).
Awards
- National Book Award, 2016
- Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence for Fiction Winner, 2017
- Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, 2017
- Hurston/Wright Legacy Award in Fiction, 2017
- ALA Black Caucus Award for Honor Book Fiction, 2017
11/22/63 by Stephen King
Gohstand Reading Room: PS3561.I483 A615 2011
Summary: “On November 22, 1963, three shots rang out in Dallas, President Kennedy died, and the world changed. What if you could change it back? The author's new novel is about a man who travels back in time to prevent the JFK assassination. In this novel that is a tribute to a simpler era, he sweeps readers back in time to another moment, a real-life moment, when everything went wrong: the JFK assassination. And he introduces readers to a character who has the power to change the course of history. Jake Epping is a thirty-five-year-old high school English teacher in Lisbon Falls, Maine, who makes extra money teaching adults in the GED program. He receives an essay from one of the students, a gruesome, harrowing first person story about the night fifty years ago when Harry Dunning's father came home and killed his mother, his sister, and his brother with a hammer. Harry escaped with a smashed leg, as evidenced by his crooked walk. Not much later, Jake's friend Al, who runs the local diner, divulges a secret: his storeroom is a portal to 1958. He enlists Jake on an insane, and insanely possible, mission to try to prevent the Kennedy assassination. So begins Jake's new life as George Amberson and his new world of Elvis and JFK, of big American cars and sock hops, of a troubled loner named Lee Harvey Oswald and a beautiful high school librarian named Sadie Dunhill, who becomes the love of Jake's life, a life that transgresses all the normal rules of time” (Publisher's description)
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
Gohstand Reading Room: PS3537.T3234 G8 1993
Summary: John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath stands as one of the most influential works of 20th-century American literature. Many Americans learn about the Great Depression through this novel. Steinbeck masterfully created an important work that asks the reader to question the idea of the American Dream and the journey of individual Americans through a tumultuous time in our nation’s history.
"Published in 1939, this Pulitzer Prize-winning epic tells the story of the Joad family's migration from Oklahoma to California during the Great Depression. Through their struggles, Steinbeck vividly depicts the plight of migrant workers and the economic hardships faced by millions during the Dust Bowl era. Controversial upon release for its unflinching social criticism, The Grapes of Wrath went on to win both critical acclaim and massive popular success. It was the bestselling book of 1939 and has since been recognized as one of the greatest American novels. Steinbeck's stark prose and memorable characters have left an indelible mark on American culture" (Audible description).
Woman of Light: A Novel by Kali Fajardo-Anstine
Gohstand Reading Room: PS3606.A396 W66 2022
Summary: "1890: When Desiderya Lopez, The Sleepy Prophet, finds an abandoned infant on the banks of an arroyo, she recognizes something in his spirit and brings him home. Pidre will go on to become a famous showman in the Anglo West whose main act, Simodecea, is Pidre's fearless, sharpshooting wife, who wrangles bears as part of his show. 1935: Luz 'Little Light' Lopez and her brother Diego work the carnival circuit in downtown Denver. Luz is a tea leaf reader, and Diego is a snake charmer. One day, a pale-faced woman in white fur asks Luz for a reading, calling her by a name that only her brother knows. Later that night at a party downtown, Luz sees Diego dancing with this pale-faced woman, which results in a brawl with the local white supremacist group. Diego leaves town for cover and Luz is left trying to get justice for her brother and family. Merging two multi-generational storylines in Colorado, this is a novel of family love, secrets, and survival. With Fajardo-Anstine's immense capacity to render characters and paint vivid life, set against the Sangre de Cristo mountains, Woman of Light is full of the weight, richness, and complexities of mixed blood and mica clay. It delights like an Old Western, and inspires the hope embedded in histories yet-told" (Publisher's description).
The Scarlett Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
Gohstand Reading Room: PS1868.A1 1940a
Summary: Just as alternative history often asks, "What if an event happened differently?", Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlett Letter, published in 1850, asks its readers, "What if a woman in the rigid Puritan era rebelled against society's patriarchal laws?"
"Nathaniel Hawthorne’s masterpiece, an iconic fable of guilt and redemption set in Puritan Massachusetts, has long been considered one of the greatest American novels. The story of Hester Prynne—found out in adultery, pilloried by her Puritan community, and abandoned, in different ways, by both her partner in sin and her vengeance-seeking husband—possesses a reality heightened by Hawthorne’s sympathy and his unmixed devotion to his supposedly fallen but fundamentally innocent heroine. The Scarlett Letter rightly deserves its stature as the first great novel written by an American, a work of moral force and narrative power that announced a literature equal to any in the world” (Publisher's description).
For a new take on The Scarlett Letter, readers may also want to consider the 2022 novel Hester by Laurie Lico Albanese.
Hester: A Novel by Laura Lico Albanese
Gohstand Reading Room: PS3562.I324 H47 2022
Summary: Hester is a form of historical fiction, that centers on providing a fictional backstory and reimagining of Nathaniel Hawthorne's classic The Scarlet Letter. It is not strictly "alternate history" in the traditional sense, but rather a "what-if" literary speculation.
“In this sensuous and hypnotizing tale, a young immigrant woman grapples with our country's complicated past and learns that America's ideas of freedom and liberty often fall short of their promise. Interwoven with Isobel and Nathaniel's story is a vivid interrogation of who gets to be a 'real' American in the first half of the 19th century, a depiction of the early days of the Underground Railroad in New England, and atmospheric interstitials that capture the long history of 'unusual' women being accused of witchcraft. Meticulously researched yet evocatively imagined, Laurie Lico Albanese's Hester is a timeless tale of art, ambition, and desire that examines the roots of female creative power and the men who try to shut it down" (Publisher's description).
Cahokia Jazz by Francis Spufford
Gohstand Reading Room: PR6119.P84 C35 2024
Summary: “Francis Spufford's novel imagines a 1920s city in which Native Americans still hold territory and political power, and the 'color line' doesn't exist — until a grisly murder disrupts everything” (NPR review).
"Like Golden Hill, inhabits a different version of America, and like Golden Hill it has a propulsive and brilliantly twisty plot set within a fully imagined world. Only this world is full of fog, cigarette smoke, dubious motives, danger, and dark deeds. And in the main character of Joe Barrow, we have a hero of truly heroic proportions, and a troubled soul to fall in love with. One snowy night at the end of winter, Barrow and his partner find a body on the roof of a skyscraper. Down below, streetcar bells ring, factory whistles blow, Americans drink in speakeasies and dance to the tempo of modern times. But this is Cahokia, the ancient indigenous city beside the Mississippi living on as a teeming industrial metropolis containing every race and creed. Among them, peace holds. Just about. But the corpse on the roof will spark a week of drama in which this altered world will spill its secrets and be brought, against a soundtrack of wailing clarinets, either to destruction or to rebirth" (Publisher's description).
The Plot Against America by Phillip Roth
Gohstand Reading Room: PS3568.O855 P58 2004
“Raises the stakes as high as a patriotic novel can take them…. Effortlessly, it seems, Roth has led us to suspend disbelief; then he makes us believe; then he suspends this belief and finally removes it…. A fabulous yarn.” - Los Angeles Book Review
Summary: “In an extraordinary feat of narrative invention, Philip Roth imagines an alternate history where Franklin D. Roosevelt loses the 1940 presidential election to heroic aviator and rabid isolationist Charles A. Lindbergh. Shortly thereafter, Lindbergh negotiates a cordial “understanding” with Adolf Hitler, while the new government embarks on a program of folksy anti-Semitism. For one boy growing up in Newark, Lindbergh’s election is the first in a series of ruptures that threatens to destroy his small, safe corner of America—and with it, his mother, his father, and his older brother” (Harper Collins Publisher Summary).
Prizes:
Society of American Historians James Fenimore Cooper Prize, 2005.
Vampires of El Norte by Isabel Cañas
Gohstand Reading Room: PS3603.A533 V36 2023
Summary: Vampires of El Norte by Isabel Cañas offers an alternative history reimagining the Mexican American War (1846–1848) by blending real colonial history and the Mexican borderlands with supernatural horror and offering a thought provoking take on historical narratives that romanticize the nineteenth century ideology of manifest destiny.
"As the daughter of a rancher in 1840s Mexico, Nena knows a thing or two about monsters—her home has long been threatened by tensions with Anglo settlers from the north. But something more sinister lurks near the ranch at night, something that drains men of their blood and leaves them for dead. Something that once attacked Nena nine years ago. Believing Nena dead, Néstor has been on the run from his grief ever since, moving from ranch to ranch working as a vaquero. But no amount of drink can dispel the night terrors of sharp teeth; no woman can erase his childhood sweetheart from his mind. When the United States attacks Mexico in 1846, the two are brought abruptly together on the road to war: Nena as a curandera, a healer striving to prove her worth to her father so that he does not marry her off to a stranger, and Néstor as a member of the auxiliary cavalry of ranchers and vaqueros. But the shock of their reunion—and Nena's rage at Néstor for seemingly abandoning her long ago—is quickly overshadowed by the appearance of a nightmare made flesh. And unless Nena and Néstor work through their past and face the future together, neither will survive to see the dawn" (Publisher's description).
The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen
Gohstand Reading Room: PS3614.G97 S96 2015
Summary: “Told from the viewpoint of a Vietnamese refugee living in the United States, the book strives to reeducate the American public on its own history and bring to light a perspective not often seen in western literature” (Matros). The winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (2016), as well as seven other awards, The Sympathizer is one of the most acclaimed books of the twenty-first century. With the pace and suspense of a thriller and prose that has been compared to Graham Greene and Vladimir Nabokov, The Sympathizer is a sweeping epic of love and betrayal. The narrator, a communist double agent, is a 'man of two minds,' a half-French, half-Vietnamese army captain who comes to America after the Fall of Saigon, and while building a new life with other Vietnamese refugees in Los Angeles is secretly reporting back to his communist superiors in Vietnam. The Sympathizer is a blistering exploration of identity and America, a gripping spy novel, and a powerful story of love and friendship" (Publisher's description).
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