National Bestseller - One of the year's most acclaimed works of
nonfiction
A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: New York Times, Washington Post, New
Yorker, Chicago Tribune, Kirkus, New York Post, Fast Company
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 people into prison for opinions they
voiced--in one notable case, only in private. Self-appointed vigilantes
executed tens of thousands of citizens' 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
era blighted by lynchings, censorship, and the sadistic, sometimes fatal
abuse of conscientious objectors in military prisons--a time whose toxic
currents of racism, nativism, red-baiting, and contempt for the rule of
law then flowed directly through the intervening decades to poison our
own. It was a tumultuous period defined by a diverse and colorful cast
of characters, some of whom fueled the injustice while others fought
against it: from the sphinxlike Woodrow Wilson, to the fiery antiwar
advocates Kate Richards O'Hare and Emma Goldman, to labor champion
Eugene Debs, to a little-known but ambitious bureaucrat named J. Edgar
Hoover, and to an outspoken leftwing agitator--who was in fact Hoover's
star undercover agent. It is a time that we have mostly forgotten about,
until now.
In American Midnight, award-winning historian Adam Hochschild brings
alive the horrifying yet inspiring four years following the U.S. entry
into the First World War, spotlighting forgotten repression while
celebrating an unforgettable set of Americans who strove to fix their
fractured country--and showing how their struggles still guide us today.
