Between World War I and the Roaring Twenties lies a largely forgotten chapter of American history—one whose tensions still echo a hundred years later. In these turbulent years, democracy was tested by war, pandemic, and violence driven by conflicts over race, immigration, and labor rights.
In American Midnight: The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy’s Forgotten Crisis, legendary historian Adam Hochschild brings this moment vividly to life, revealing both the repression that darkened the era and the Americans who struggled to repair a fractured nation. The forces they confronted did not disappear; they continue to reverberate.
Join Malcolm Clemens Young, Dean of Grace Cathedral, for a conversation with Hochschild on how the past resonates into the present, and shapes the questions we’re asking today.
Adam Hochschild (pronunciation: ”Hoch” as in ”spoke”; ”schild” as in ”build”) is the author of eleven books. American Midnight: The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy’s Forgotten Crisis is his most recent. His preceding book, the biography Rebel Cinderella: From Rags to Riches to Radical, the Epic Journey of Rose Pastor Stokes, was published in 2020. Spain in Our Hearts: Americans in the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939, appeared in 2016. Of his earlier books, Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire’s Slaves won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the PEN USA Literary Award, and was a finalist for the National Book Award. 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 both finalists for the National Book Critics Circle Award. His Finding the Trapdoor: Essays, Portraits, Travels and the recent Lessons from a Dark Time and Other Essays collect his shorter pieces, including magazine reporting from five continents. Earlier in his career, he was a reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle, a commentator on National Public Radio’s “All Things Considered,” and a co-founder, editor, and writer at Mother Jones magazine. He has received the Theodore Roosevelt-Woodrow Wilson Award from the American Historical Association and in 2014 was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is a three-time winner of the California Book Awards’ Gold Medal for Nonfiction.
The Very Rev. Dr. Malcolm Clemens Young is the dean of Grace Cathedral. He is the author of The Spiritual Journal of Henry David Thoreau and The Invisible Hand in Wilderness: Economics, Ecology, and God, and is a regular contributor on religion to the Huffington Post and San Francisco Examiner.
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