The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Higher Angels

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Pulitzer Prize–profitable creator Jon Meacham helps us perceive the current second in American politics and life by trying again at vital occasions in our historical past when hope overcame division and worry.


ONE OF OPRAH’S “BOOKS THAT HELP ME THROUGH” • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY NPR • The Christian Science Monitor • Southern Dwelling


Our present local weather of partisan fury is just not new, and in
The Soul of America Meacham reveals us how what Abraham Lincoln known as the “higher angels of our nature” have repeatedly received the day. Portray shocking portraits of Lincoln and different presidents, together with Ulysses S. Grant, Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, and Lyndon B. Johnson, and illuminating the braveness of such influential citizen activists as Martin Luther King, Jr., early suffragettes Alice Paul and Carrie Chapman Catt, civil rights pioneers Rosa Parks and John Lewis, First Woman Eleanor Roosevelt, and Military-McCarthy hearings lawyer Joseph N. Welch, Meacham brings vividly to life turning factors in American historical past. He writes in regards to the Civil Struggle, Reconstruction, and the beginning of the Misplaced Trigger; the backlash in opposition to immigrants within the First World Struggle and the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan within the Twenties; the battle for ladies’s rights; the demagoguery of Huey Lengthy and Father Coughlin and the isolationist work of America First within the years earlier than World Struggle II; the anti-Communist witch-hunts led by Senator Joseph McCarthy; and Lyndon Johnson’s campaign in opposition to Jim Crow. Every of those dramatic hours in our nationwide life have been formed by the competition to guide the nation to look ahead relatively than again, to claim hope over worry—a wrestle that continues even now.

Whereas the American story has not all the time—and even typically—been heroic, we’ve got been sustained by a perception in progress even within the gloomiest of occasions. On this inspiring e-book, Meacham reassures us, “The excellent news is that we’ve got come by way of such darkness earlier than”—as, again and again, Lincoln’s higher angels have discovered a option to prevail.


Reward for The Soul of America

“Sensible, fascinating, well timed . . . With compelling narratives of previous eras of strife and disenchantment, Meacham affords knowledge for our personal time.”
—Walter Isaacson

“Gripping and provoking,
The Soul of America is Jon Meacham’s declaration of his religion in America.”
—Newsday


“Meacham offers readers a long-term perspective on American historical past and a motive to imagine the soul of America is in the end one in all kindness and caring, not rancor and paranoia.”
—USA At the moment