Evocative and impeccably curated—reframing America’s past to inform a more democratic and vigilant future.
A panoramic collection of historical writing, illuminating America’s evolving democracy and the dissent that drives it.
Broad in scope yet vivid, this collection edited by Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Meacham (And There Was Light: Abraham Lincoln and the American Struggle, 2022) represents a notable departure from his biographies. Here he curates a sweeping chronicle of American democracy’s promises and betrayals. Drawing on speeches, letters, and landmark texts from the first representative assembly in 1619 to the present, Meacham places enduring milestones—the Declaration of Independence, the Gettysburg Address, the Civil Rights Movement—alongside influential and less familiar voices, including investigative journalist Ida B. Wells, chronicling racial violence at the turn of the 20th century; labor leader Eugene V. Debs, decrying wartime suppression of dissent in 1918; and civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer, whose 1964 testimony at the Democratic National Convention exposed voter suppression and brutality in Mississippi. Meacham frames the collection as both an inheritance and a warning: “This anthology seeks to put our best and our worst before a divided and often dispirited nation—and to remind us that conscientious citizenship is essential to bringing out the more perfect Union envisioned in the Preamble to the Constitution,” noting earlier that America “has had shining hours; it has also dwelt in darkness,” underscoring that progress is neither linear nor guaranteed. The selections trace a chronological arc of reform, from Abigail Adams’ 1776 plea to “Remember the Ladies” to Frederick Douglass’ defiance of Dred Scott in the 1850s, to Theodore Parker’s 1853 assertion that “the arc…bends towards justice,” and to the civil rights era of the 1960s, where Hamer’s testimony stands as vivid proof of democracy’s ongoing struggle. By presenting the raw materials of U.S. history with context and moral clarity, Meacham helps readers understand the past and orient themselves in the ongoing fight for a “more perfect Union.”
Evocative and impeccably curated—reframing America’s past to inform a more democratic and vigilant future.Pub Date: Feb. 17, 2026
ISBN: 9780593597552
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 25, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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