num_pages: 422
description: From award-winning New York Times bestselling historian Adam Hochschild a fast-paced revelatory new account of a pivotal but neglected period in American history: World War I and its stormy aftermath when bloodshed and repression on the home front nearly doomed American democracy.The nation was on the brink. Angry mobs burned Black churches to the ground and chased down pacifists and immigrants. Well over a thousand men and women were jailed solely for what they had written or said even in private. An astonishing 250000 people joined a nationwide vigilante groupsponsored by the Department of Justice.This was America during and after the Great War: a brief but appalling era blighted by torture censorship and killings. Adam Hochschild brings to life this troubled period which stretched from 1917 to 1921 through the interwoven tales of a colorful cast of characters: some well-known among them the sphinxlike Woodrow Wilson and the ambitious young bureaucrat J. Edgar Hoover; others less familiar such as the fiery antiwar advocate Kate Richards OHare and the outspoken Leo Wendell a labor radical who was frequently arrested and wholly trusted by his comradesbut who was in fact Hoovers star undercover agent.A groundbreaking work of narrative history American Midnight recalls these horrifying yet inspiring four years when some brave Americans strove to keep their fractured country democratic while ruthless others stimulated toxic currents of racism nativism red-baiting and contempt for the rule of lawpoisons that feel ominously familiar today.
language: English
title: American Midnight: The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy's Forgotten Crisis
publisher: Mariner Books