The United States' history can be traced back through facts, personal experiences, politics, and even art. This is what Fabrizio Tonello, Americanist and senior scholar at the University of Padua, has done in his latest book “America in 18 Paintings. From Plantations to Silicon Valley” (Laterza Editori). The journey begins with 18 pieces on display at the Whitney Museum in New York and progresses through a broad and fascinating history of the United States, from the values of equality and freedom inscribed in the 1776 Declaration of Independence to the Trump government of 2025. Why paintings? Because painting investigates, explores, and discloses. Painting has the potential to portray the invisible, and what has occurred in America over the last two and a half centuries has frequently gone unnoticed or forgotten. These paintings, almost completely unknown to the Italian public, together with the stories of those who created, commissioned, and owned them, immerse the reader in significant but under-researched periods of American history: the cotton empire and emancipation struggles in the South;  worker–plutocrat conflicts at the end of the 19th century, often fought with weapons in hand; the surprising link between whiskey and class struggle; climate refugees created by tornadoes that devastated the Great Plains in the 1930s; the collective hysteria over fears of Russian espionage in the 1950s; the consequences of nuclear atmospheric testing. There are numerous fascinating and amusing stories, such as the one about the Massachusetts whaling fleet, which was preyed upon by the Confederate navy during the American Civil War, much to the benefit of the cetaceans.