From the outset in AMERICAN STRUGGLE, Jon Meacham makes clear where he stands on what we Americans have witnessed since our founding: “Nativism, xenophobia, cultural populism, and broad political fear have shaped the Republic from the beginning, and always will…. We do ourselves no favors by pretending that American history is either cheerfully grand or unrelievedly bleak.”

The Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer of numerous New York Times bestsellers, including AND THERE WAS LIGHT and HIS TRUTH IS MARCHING ON, illustrates his point through dozens of primary-source documents and his own concise comments. He allows these documents to argue with one another across time and trusts readers to draw their own conclusions.

"While not traditional history, the cumulative effect of presenting this array of opinions over a 400-year span is to give readers an understanding of, and appreciation for, the difficult journey that the country and its people have been on."

Beginning in 1619 and extending to the present day (with a final article on “The Path to American Authoritarianism”), AMERICAN STRUGGLE gathers writings and speeches from politicians, historians, activists and observers grappling with the defining issues of their eras. The result is an anthology that highlights how and why the United States has veered between conflicting views of what a more perfect union might look like. It is by turns dismaying and comforting to review what beliefs our politicians and civic leaders have espoused or, in some cases, conveniently adopted.

Meacham includes speeches, letters and documents from figures like Thomas Jefferson, Daniel Webster, Shirley Chisholm, Edward R. Murrow, and --- in perhaps the most prescient document in the book --- Richard Hofstadter on the subject of “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” an essay that was written in 1965.

But the sections on the Civil War and Reconstruction, as well as the Civil Rights and “Expansion of Democracy” movements, get particular attention, with Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address in the former and everyone from Martin Luther King Jr. to Fannie Lou Hamer and Elizabeth Cady Stanton in the latter. Meacham also revisits ugly periods that are often forgotten, such as the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s and the Army-McCarthy hearings in the 1950s.

While not traditional history, the cumulative effect of presenting this array of opinions over a 400-year span is to give readers an understanding of, and appreciation for, the difficult journey that the country and its people have been on. Timed perfectly for the 250th anniversary of our founding, AMERICAN STRUGGLE is an ideal companion for anyone who wants to know how we got here.