Alexandra Petri's US History
Important American Documents (I Made Up)
6 October 2023
Description
If you’re going to lie about the past, you might as well make up lies that are fun!
Washington Post humour columnist Alexandra Petri is perhaps America’s most beloved political satirist. Her new, side-splitting work of historical humour uses imagined documents to create a laugh-out-loud, irreverent takedown of our nation’s complicated past.
From the Spanish conquistadors to the Salem witch trials, from Paul Revere’s ride to the exclamation mark in Oklahoma!, Alexandra Petri’s U.S. History presents a deranged timeline in which John and Abigail Adams try sexting, the March sisters from Little Women are sixty feet tall, Nicola Tesla’s friends stage an intervention when he falls in love with a pigeon and Susan Sontag goes to summer camp. A witty, absurdist satire of the last 500 years, Petri’s “historical fan fiction” shows why she has been hailed as “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
Reviews
"Petri’s writing is consistently witty and erudite without the slightest hint of pretentiousness… If you can make the 19th-century debate over monetary policy funny, you’re clearly on to something." — Matthew Cantor, The Guardian
"Brilliantly bananas…. Petri’s latest book demonstrates primarily two things: One, she is a genius; and two, no, she really is…. Satire at the highest level. …[A] godsend of a book." — Amy Fusselman, The Washington Post
Also By: Alexandra Petri 
Nothing Is Wrong and Here Is Why: Essays
Paperback, 2021
These impossibly cheerful essays on the routine horrors of the present era explain everything from the resurgence of measles to the fiasco of the US presidency.
Nothing Is Wrong and Here Is Why: Essays
Hardback, 2020
These impossibly cheerful essays on the routine horrors of the present era explain everything from the resurgence of measles to the fiasco of the US presidency.
Nothing Is Wrong and Here Is Why: Essays
E Book, 2020
These impossibly cheerful essays on the routine horrors of the present era explain everything from the resurgence of measles to the fiasco of the US presidency.
