What does America stand for in the twenty-first century? Behold, America confronts this urgent question by looking at the story behind two of the most contentious phrases in the American political playbook: the ‘American dream’ and ‘America first’
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 and she comments regularly on arts, culture, and politics for television and radio. She lives in London.
A ripping yarn ... Behold, America is an enthralling book ...
Passionate, well-researched and comprehensive
*Guardian*
Excoriating, brilliant
*Big Issue, Summer Reads*
Enormously entertaining. Churchwell is a careful and sensitive
reader, writes with great vigour and has a magpie’s eye for a
revealing story
*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*
The Trump administration has prompted a veritable landslide of
books about the current state of US culture and politics. Literary
journalist and professor Sarah Churchwell digs a little deeper than
most, providing a thoughtful long view on a highly topical
subject
*BBC History Magazine, Summer Reads*
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
*i*
Churchwell’s thoroughness in delineating America’s decade-by-decade
bigotry through primary sources from speeches to newspapers to
novels is a marvel. But it is more than a history lesson. She’s
constructing the case for how the US elected Donald Trump, a
catastrophe many of us struggle to understand
*Prospect Magazine*
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