The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Higher Angels

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


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 Residing


Our present local weather of partisan fury will not be new, and in
The Soul of America Meacham reveals us how what Abraham Lincoln referred to 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 Girl Eleanor Roosevelt, and Military-McCarthy hearings lawyer Joseph N. Welch, Meacham brings vividly to life turning factors in American historical past. He writes concerning the Civil Warfare, Reconstruction, and the delivery of the Misplaced Trigger; the backlash towards immigrants within the First World Warfare and the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan within the Nineteen Twenties; the combat for girls’s rights; the demagoguery of Huey Lengthy and Father Coughlin and the isolationist work of America First within the years earlier than World Warfare II; the anti-Communist witch-hunts led by Senator Joseph McCarthy; and Lyndon Johnson’s campaign towards Jim Crow. Every of those dramatic hours in our nationwide life have been formed by the competition to guide the nation to look ahead moderately than again, to claim hope over concern—a wrestle that continues even now.

Whereas the American story has not at all times—and even usually—been heroic, we’ve 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 come via such darkness earlier than”—as, repeatedly, Lincoln’s higher angels have discovered a strategy to prevail.


Reward for The Soul of America

“Sensible, fascinating, well timed . . . With compelling narratives of previous eras of strife and disenchantment, Meacham provides 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 provides readers a long-term perspective on American historical past and a purpose to imagine the soul of America is in the end considered one of kindness and caring, not rancor and paranoia.”
—USA At present