National Bestseller * aNew York Times, Washington PostandNew Yorker “Best Books of 2022” selection * New York TimesEditor’s Choice * a most anticipated book of Fall 2022: the New York Times, Boston Globe, Los Angeles Times and Chicago Tribune
From legendary historian Adam Hochschild, a “masterly” (New York Times) reassessment of the overlooked but startlingly resonant period between World War I and the Roaring Twenties, when the foundations of American democracy were threatened by war, pandemic, and violence fueled by battles over race, immigration, and the rights of labor
The nation was on the brink. Mobs burned Black churches to the ground. Courts threw thousands of peopleinto prison foropinions they voicedin one notable case, onlyin private. Self-appointed vigilantes executed tens of thousands ofcitizens’ arrests.Some seventy-five newspapers and magazines were banned from the mail and forced to close. When the government stepped in, it was often to fan the flames.
This was America during and after the Great War: a brief but appalling erablighted bylynchings, censorship, and the sadistic, sometimes fatal abuse of conscientious objectors in military prisonsa time whosetoxic currents of racism, nativism, red-baiting, and contempt for the rule of law then floweddirectly through the intervening decades to poison our own.It was a tumultuousperiod defined by adiverse and colorful cast of characters, some of whom fueled the injustice while others fought against it:from the sphinxlike Woodrow Wilson,tothe fieryantiwaradvocatesKate Richards O’Hareand Emma Goldman, to labor champion Eugene Debs, to a little-knownbut ambitiousbureaucratnamedJ. Edgar Hoover, and to an outspoken leftwing agitatorwho was in fact Hoover’s star undercover agent.Itis a timethatwehave mostly forgotten about, until now.
InAmerican Midnight, award-winning historian Adam Hochschildbrings alive thehorrifying yet inspiring fouryearsfollowing the U.S. entry intothe First World War, spotlighting forgotten repression while celebrating an unforgettable set of Americans who strove to fix their fractured countryand showing how their struggles still guide us today.