by Jon Meacham
First published 2018
Pulitzer Prize winner Jon Meacham argues that America's current political divisions echo past crises that the nation ultimately overcame. He examines pivotal moments when hope defeated fear and division, from the Civil War through the civil rights era. Meacham profiles presidents like Lincoln, Grant, Theodore Roosevelt, Wilson, FDR, Truman, Eisenhower, and Johnson alongside citizen activists including Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks, John Lewis, Eleanor Roosevelt, and suffragettes Alice Paul and Carrie Chapman Catt. The book covers Reconstruction and the Lost Cause mythology, World War I immigrant backlash, the 1920s KKK resurgence, the women's suffrage fight, Depression-era demagogues like Huey Long and Father Coughlin, pre-World War II isolationism, McCarthyist witch hunts, and Johnson's battle against Jim Crow. Meacham demonstrates how each crisis featured a struggle between those pushing America forward versus backward. The book offers reassurance that despite imperfect progress, Americans have consistently chosen hope over fear when it mattered most.
Genres: history, 20th-century, american, political-science, non-fiction, biography-memoir, 21st-century, american-history
Vibes: emotional, thought-provoking
Tropes: historical-figures, overcoming-adversity
Setting: America, United States
Period: Civil War, Civil Rights Era, Great Depression, Reconstruction, World War I, World War II
402 pages · Hardcover · Random House