This early experience helped to shape his lifelong preoccupation with American history, the settlement of the continent, and issues of race, and political power.

In the late 1960s, he did voter registration for the NAACP in the still-segregated South; he also worked as a roustabout in Alaska's Arctic oil fields, a taxi driver in New York City, and a deckhand on a Norwegian freighter.

In 2015, he served as chairman of the awards committee for the Frederick Douglass Book Prize, given by the Gilder-Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition, at Yale University.

As a journalist, he has traveled extensively in Asia, the Middle East, Europe, and Africa, writing on politics, economic issues, culture, and history, on subjects ranging from the civil war in Burma, religious repression in China, Islamic fundamentalism, German reunification, the Irish economy, Kenya's population crisis, and many others.

"[citation needed]Kirkus Reviews called it a "Wholly enjoyable study of an earlier era of intense political partisanship...Bordewich portrays a colorful cast of characters—Democrats, Whigs, Free Soilers and abolitionists—whose passionate rhetoric attained lyrical heights and brought the debate about America's very identity to the forefront.

Jonathan Yardley of The Washington Post wrote, "The role played by blacks in the early development of this country has been scanted for more than two centuries... and is only recently being placed in proper perspective.