John Green’s Crash Course in U.S. History: From Colonialism to Obama in 47 Videos

Those who can­not remem­ber the past, said George San­tayana, are con­demned to repeat it. Luck­i­ly, if you learn about the past from John Green’s Crash Course video series, you can play them on repeat as many times as you like until you do remem­ber it. We’ve pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured the acclaimed young-adult nov­el­ist, pio­neer­ing vlog­ger, inter­net edu­ca­tor, and appar­ent his­to­ry buff Green’s Crash Course in Big His­to­ry and Crash Course in World His­to­ry, and today we have for you his much more nar­row­ly-focused Crash Course in U.S. His­to­ry.

The his­to­ry of the Unit­ed States of Amer­i­ca — an enti­ty much younger than not just the uni­verse and the world but than most oth­er coun­tries — would seem entire­ly man­age­able by com­par­i­son, one Green and his team could knock off in a few weeks and move on to grander sub­jects. But as any­one in the non­fic­tion pub­lish­ing indus­try knows, when Amer­i­can his­to­ry sells, it sells, not just because of the coun­try’s promi­nent place on the world stage, but because Amer­i­can his­to­ry con­nects to so many oth­er not just his­tor­i­cal but social, polit­i­cal, eco­nom­ic, and even tech­no­log­i­cal themes.

Green and com­pa­ny (a group that includes his one­time high school his­to­ry teacher) thus have more than enough to work with for all 47 episodes of Crash Course U.S. His­to­ry, from the natives and the Spaniards to the Amer­i­can Rev­o­lu­tion to the Civ­il War to the Great Depres­sion to the 60s to the Clin­ton years to what the series calls Oba­ma­na­tion — with plen­ty in between. Green tells the sto­ry with his usu­al mix­ture of well-select­ed detail, copi­ous visu­al aids, and dizzy­ing speed (enough of all of them so that you real­ly do need to re-watch the videos, or at least pause them fre­quent­ly), result­ing in a breezy yet sur­pris­ing­ly com­pre­hen­sive long-form primer on just what made the Unit­ed States so big, so pow­er­ful, so inno­v­a­tive, so self-regard­ing, so frus­trat­ing — and, ulti­mate­ly, so fas­ci­nat­ing.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

A Crash Course in World His­to­ry

Crash Course Big His­to­ry: John Green Teach­es Life, the Uni­verse & Every­thing

Down­load 78 Free Online His­to­ry Cours­es: From Ancient Greece to The Mod­ern World

A Short His­to­ry of Amer­i­ca, Accord­ing to the Irrev­er­ent Com­ic Satirist Robert Crumb

Col­in Mar­shall writes on cities, lan­guage, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.