Books to Read for Independence Day and Year Long in Celebration of America’s Independence.

The WSJ has recommendations for your reading pleasure that will “shed light on America’s beginning.” Included is my own recommendation, the engaging book I’m reading on Thomas Jefferson.

Black Writers of the Founding Era

• More than 100 black voices—soldiers, servants, poets, preachers and many others—speak from the era of America’s birth. Review by Amanda Brickell Bellows 

Glorious Lessons: John Tumball, Paitner of the American Revolution

• The Connecticut-born painter created heroic depictions of America’s triumph against the British. Review by Stephen Brumwell

Liberty’s Grid: A Founding Father, a Mathematical Dreamland, and the Shaping of America

• Surveyors of the early United States imposed geometric order on a vast expanse of territory. The endeavor had its critics. Review by Stephen Budiansky

Mental Maps of the Founders

• For Jefferson, Gallatin and others, a geographical orientation—the perspective of place—shaped their sense of what the new nation should look like. Review by Adam Rowe

A Revolutionary Friendship: Washington, Jefferson and the American Republic

• The two Founding Fathers—both Virginians—enjoyed a strong bond until partisan politics caused them to fall out. Review by William Anthony Hay

This Fierce People: The Untold Story of America’s Revolutionary War in the South

• Did the South win the Revolutionary War? The history of the Continental Army’s southern campaign is less well-known than that of the battles that took place further north. That history was characterized by brutal fighting and was vital to the triumph over the British. Review by Barton Swaim

The Unexpected Abigail Adams: A Women “Not Expected to Be Intimidated”

• The press reminded John Adams’s wife of an “envenomed toad” spitting forth poison. She had hard words for Alexander Hamilton, too. Review by Melanie Kirkpatrick

Twilight at Monticello

• I am nearing the end of reading this “unprecedented and engrossing” personal look at Thomas Jefferson in his final years. It will alter the way readers think about this true American icon. Alan Pell Crawford gives an authoritative and moving portrait of Thomas Jefferson as private citizen and statesman, highlighting Jefferson’s astonishing ingenuity and architectural gifts. Mistakes along the way, Jefferson made a few. Not among them was closeness to family, key to Jefferson’s contentment.