Slack-jawed Americans watching the US Capitol attack unfold on January 6th, 2021 could be forgiven for thinking the US had never faced such a crisis. But it has. Heralded historian Adam Hochschild (King Leopold’s Ghost, Bury the Chains) takes us back to an eerily similar age: during and after the “war to end all wars”.

On the road to the Roaring 20s, the United States saw racial violence that killed hundreds of Black Americans. Immigrant-bashing was at a peak; refugees were scorned. The White House not only tolerated vigilante justice, it openly encouraged it. And in a press censorship coup Donald Trump could only dream of, the government shut down dozens of publications, and banned single issues of others.

Hochschild’s new book American Midnight: A Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy’s Forgotten Crisis reinvigorates the characters that oversaw the chaos: anti-war firebrands, labor agitators, shadowy government agents, and overseeing them all, the sphinx-like Woodrow Wilson. With it all, Hochschild reanimates an era’s toxic currents of racism, nativism, red-baiting, and contempt for the rule of law that flowed right through the ages to poison our own

Join us for this illuminating conversation: Adam Hochschild with Kepler’s journalist-in-residence Angie Coiro, for our This Is Now series.

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