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Adam Hochschild: “American Midnight”

Chats with Champions is proud to present historian Adam Hochschild, the author of American Midnight: The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy’s Forgotten Crisis. Hochschild will speak on Thursday, August 31, at 10 am. Please allow adequate time to find parking.

Adam Hochschild has written 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.

Adam Hochschild writes frequently about issues of human rights and social justice. American Midnight: The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy’s Forgotten Crisis won the Gold Medal for Nonfiction of the 2023 California Book Awards. His previous books King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa and To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918 were finalists for the National Book Critics Circle Award. His Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire’s Slaves was a finalist for the National Book Award and won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the PEN USA Literary Award. Hochschild has also written for The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Nation, and many other magazines, and teaches at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism.

Web page: https://journalism.berkeley.edu/person/adam_hochschild/

Chats with Champions is a free community offering sponsored by Skidompha Library and Sherman’s Books. Skidompha is located at 184 Main Street, Damariscotta. For more information, call the library at 207-887-0919.