Behold, America: A History of America First and the American Dream - Hardcover

Churchwell, Sarah

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1408894807 ISBN 13: 9781408894804

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2018

Synopsis

A GUARDIAN AND A SMITHSONIAN BOOK OF THE YEAR A SUNDAY TIMES , OBSERVER AND I-PAPER SUMMER READ 'Enormously entertaining' Sunday Times 'Fascinating' New Statesman 'An enthralling book' Guardian 'The American dream is dead,' Donald Trump said when announcing his candidacy for president in 2015. How would he revive it? By putting 'America First'. The 'American Dream' and 'America First' are two of the most loaded phrases in America today, and also two of the most misunderstood. The American Dream began as a pledge for equality rather than as a dream of supremacy and 'making it big'. America First has not just served as an isolationist term, but as an early slogan of the Ku Klux Klan with surprising links to the present. In 1927, a KKK riot led to the arrest of seven men - among them a certain Fred C. Trump. Both phrases were born nearly a century ago and instantly tangled over capitalism, democracy and race, coming to embody opposing views in the battle to define the soul of the nation. Behold, America recounts the unknown history of these two expressions using the voices that helped shape that debate, from Capitol Hill to the newsroom of the New York Times , students to senators, dreamers to dissenters. As America struggles again to project a shared vision, to itself and to the world, Sarah Churchwell argues that the meanings and history of these terms need to be understood afresh so that the true spirit of America can be reclaimed. Insightful and revelatory, Behold, America overturns everything we thought we knew about the American dream, America First and the battle for the identity of modern America.

About this title

About the Author:

Sarah Churchwell is Professor of American Literature and Chair of Public Understanding of the Humanities at the School of Advanced Study, University of London. She is the author of Careless People: Murder, Mayhem and The Invention of The Great Gatsby and The Many Lives of Marilyn Monroe. Her literary journalism has appeared widely in newspapers including the Guardian, New Statesman, Financial Times, Times Literary Supplement and New York Times Book Review, and she comments regularly on arts, culture, and politics for television and radio, where appearances include Question Time, Newsnight and The Review Show. She has judged many literary prizes, including the 2017 Baillie Gifford Prize for Nonfiction, the 2014 Man Booker Prize for Fiction, and she was a co-winner of the 2015 Eccles British Library Writer's Award. Her new book, Behold, America: A History of America First and the American Dream, will be published by Bloomsbury in May 2018.

Review:

A ripping yarn ... Behold, America is an enthralling book, almost a primer for the ferocious dialectic of US politics ... Much of its force derives from the echoes of the present it finds in the thunderous caverns of the past, blurred by the distortions of history. Passionate, well-researched and comprehensive, it is both a document of our times and a thrilling survey of a half-forgotten and neglected dimension of the American story * Guardian * A richly engaging account of the expressions 'the American Dream' and 'America First'. Behold, America is enormously entertaining. Churchwell is a careful and sensitive reader, writes with great vigour and has a magpie's eye for a revealing story -- Dominic Sandbrook * Sunday Times * A fascinating history of the two intersecting tropes of modern America * New Statesman * Lively and eminently readable ... Churchwell has produced a timely and clearly argued book that makes a clear case for the intellectual parallels between the first third of the 20th century and our own * Financial Times * [An] enlightening new cultural history ... The shadow of the 45th President hangs over all 300 pages of Behold, America, a book designed expressly to demonstrate just how that history rhymes with the present ... While it is indeed a history of two phrases, Behold, America is also a history of the people who used them ... An American in the UK, [Churchwell] has the benefit of an outside perspective on the country of her birth, which is prone to national self-delusions just as grand as Britain's, if not more so. Behold, America punctures many of them * The i * Churchwell takes us on a whirlwind tour of the first decades of the 20th century ... We hear the discordant voices of American reformers, immigrants, reactionaries and nativists, satirists and polemicists, Ku Klux Klansmen and ersatz Hitlers ... Churchwell is well attuned to the nuances of the national conversation * Literary Review * The figure of Donald Trump looms over Sarah Churchwell's new history of American national identity, which highlights the ugliest features of the country's ingrained traditions of intolerance and bigotry. But it is the current president's father, Fred, who first leaps off the page in a startling cameo appearance ... Churchwell is at her best when she relates in horrific detail the once commonplace public lynching of blacks, both in the North and in the South, and she is astute about the crackpot/booster strains in American culture * Spectator * Churchwell's thorough, fascinating history of the birth of the America First movement uses the past to throw disturbing light on present-day politics in the US -- What to read in 2018 * i *

About this edition

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
• Publication date: 2018
• ISBN 10: 1408894807
• ISBN 13: 9781408894804
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 384