Jon Meacham is one of America’s most gifted and well-known writer/historians. His way with words, facility with research, and perspective on our nation’s history have earned him a wall full of prizes, including the Pulitzer for his biography of President Andrew Jackson. He has commented on politics for MS NOW, PBS, C-SPAN, and even The Late Show With Stephen Colbert.

But his new anthology, American Struggle: Democracy, Dissent, and the Pursuit of a More Perfect Union,(Random House, Feb. 17), is a departure from telling the story in his own way. It’s a gallery of unfiltered voices collected by Meacham from more than 400 years of American history, across all points on the political spectrum, including strivers, heroes, and scoundrels. His job, he says, was to find those voices and “get out of the way.” The result is a vivid, you-are-there odyssey through some of America’s darkest passages.

Some voices in American Struggle, like the once-enslaved abolitionist Frederick Douglass, are enormously powerful. The existence of slavery, Douglass thundered in 1852, “destroys your moral power abroad; it corrupts your politicians at home. It saps the foundation of religion; it makes your name a hissing, and a by-word to a mocking earth.” Some, like Alexander Stephens, vice president of the Confederacy, are shocking in their sentiments; Stephens wrote that the foundation of the Confederacy rested “on the great truth that that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition.”

Many prefigure our current struggles. In 1934, Louisiana politician Huey P. Long, echoing today’s “tax the rich” movement, took aim at the handful of men who he said controlled the economy: “They own the banks, they own the steel mills, they own the railroads, they own the bonds, they own the mortgages, they own the stores, and they have chained the country from one end to the other.” Historian Richard Hoftstadter’s 1954 analysis of the rise of populist identity politics seems almost like prophecy. “This has become a country in which so many people do not know who they are or what they are or what they belong to or what belongs to them,” he wrote, “a country of people whose status aspirations have been whipped up to a high pitch by our democratic ethos and our rags-to-riches mythology.”

Meacham, speaking via phone from his home in Nashville, where he is working on a biography of President Dwight D. Eisenhower, readily acknowledges that our current political upheaval shaped his selections. “I think that biographers and historians have to be faithful to the eras about which we are writing,” he says. “But it would be foolhardy to deny that we paint by the light that’s coming in the window at a given moment.” American history, he adds, isa “perennial struggle between our worst impulses and our better angels. Sometimes the better angels prevail and sometimes they don’t.”Here’s the conversation, edited for length and clarity:

Your selections for American Struggle are extraordinary, voices from the best and worst of America. Tell me how you made your choices.

I wish there were a science to it, but it’s pretty much an art. I chose pieces that I thought spoke to the moment in which they were written and then inadvertently shed light on what came after.

Hofstadter is a good example. He was writing in the 1950s, but he was talking about the difference between what he called “interest politics,” in which we fight over money and allocation of resources, and “status politics,” where the arguments become not about what we’re spending but who we are and where one stands in the enormous political cultural world. When politics moves from debates about the allocation of resources to being about where one ranks, then you are opening the door to a kind of cultural populism and the division that we have today.

Who was your favorite?

The hero of the book in many ways is Frederick Douglass, for both his critique [of America’s long embrace of slavery] and his faith. The critique is devastating, but, in Douglass, there is this persistent and, to me, almost mystifying faith that the Declaration and the Constitution will someday prevail and the country will live up to its promises. For a Black man in the 1850s to believe that is a remarkable act of pure faith in both human nature and in the capacity of human beings to widen their understanding and open their arms more broadly.

Douglass had such a superb command of words. Though he was born enslaved, he was a great writer. How did he become such a master of the language?

It’s a sign of amazing study and an ability to hone what was clearly a great gift. I think he’s the most important American we need to build a monument to. He critiqued us—he didn’t let us off the hook—but he believed we could do better. And that’s the most honest and the most hopeful American vision I can think of.

His elegy to Lincoln, given at the dedication of the Freedmen’s Monument, is so eloquent and honest.

It’s one of the most profound statements about biography and human nature that I’ve ever read. I find it a deeply meaningful appreciation of the tragedy of history—and of its possibilities.

My big takeaway from this book is that the many unsettling and scary issues that we’re grappling with right now have been around from America’s beginnings. In our current era, are things worse?  Should we worry that our foundational values are in jeopardy?

The important point here is that just because we prevailed in the past, does not mean we will prevail again.This book should not be historical Ativan, right? You know, The struggle’s perennial, so let’s not worry about it. It is The struggle is perennial, so we better worry a lot about it.

That’s what I walked away with.

To me, it’s a call for action, as opposed to a work of reassurance. And many of the forces that are abroad in the land today are recognizable and persistent and are rooted in the past. It would be wonderful if a dispositive number of Americans woke up on a given morning and decided to “pursue justice, and love mercy, and walk humbly with their God [as Micah 6:8 puts it].” But most Americans don’t. Why? Because we’re human beings. And while democracy requires giving and taking, it’s a lot more fun to take than to give. That’s been true since the second chapter of Genesis, and it’s true today.

To me the moral utility of history is that if flawed and fallible people in the past managed to bend the arc of a moral universe a little bit more towards justice, despite their faults, then perhaps we can, too. And one of the points of history is to realize that the people who bent the arc in the past were not saintly.

Mary Ann Gwinn is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist in Seattle.