In one of the earlier chapters of historian Walter A. McDougall’s recently compiled volume The Gems of American History: A Lecturer’s Art, we are treated to a pregnant aside. McDougall describes a 1790s letter exchange between Charles Thomson, “spy master and eminence grise of the American Revolution,” and President George Washington. Thomson apparently suggested to Washington that they write their own memoirs, since no one but the two of them knew “what really had happened throughout the years of the national founding.” Thomson was presumably referring to all the contingencies that almost miraculously led the colonies to declare independence in 1776, making “thirteen clocks strike as one,” as Second President John Adams put it. “Washington dismissed the idea,” writes McDougall, “because he wished neither to lie to the American people nor disillusion them with the truth. He suggested that they humbly give all the credit to Providence.”

The anecdote stands out in McDougall’s collection of lectures, a rewarding if inconclusive meditation on America’s national character, precisely because it complicates a tidy narrative that McDougall had up until now spent a career refining.