“Never was this raw underside of our nation’s life more revealingly on display than from 1917-1921,” Hochschild writes in “ American Midnight.” Woodrow Wilson, the president normally treated by historians as a proselytizer for world peace, in fact oversaw an administration that fomented widespread censorship of both speech and the press threw political opponents in jail failed to protect Black citizens, especially war veterans and deported immigrants seen as rabble-rousers. What drove the historian to probe that dark era in his latest book, “American Midnight”? Consider that he conceived of it exactly 100 years later, in the first year of President Donald Trump. But to Adam Hochschild, it was right here in the U.S., whose entry into the great war set off a conflagration that severely damaged American democracy. When historians talk about the “powder keg” set off by World War I, they’re typically focused on the unstable Balkan states that sparked the war. If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from, whose fees support independent bookstores. American Midnight: The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy's Forgotten Crisis
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