Polk and both the Union and the Confederacy were internally divided during the Civil War. New Englanders opposed the War of 1812 most Whigs denounced the Mexican-American War launched by the Democratic president James K. During the American Revolution, numerous Loyalists preferred British rule to a war for independence. entry into the First World War, spotlighting forgotten repression while celebrating an unforgettable set of Americans who strove to fix their fractured country-and showing how their struggles still guide us today.With the exception of the Second World War, every military conflict in which the United States has taken part has generated an anti-war movement. In American Midnight, award-winning historian Adam Hochschild brings alive the horrifying yet inspiring four years following the U.S. It is a time that we have mostly forgotten about, until now. Edgar Hoover, and to an outspoken leftwing agitator-who was in fact Hoover's star undercover agent. It was a tumultuous period defined by a diverse and colorful cast of characters, some of whom fueled the injustice while others fought against it: from the sphinxlike Woodrow Wilson, to the fiery antiwar advocates Kate Richards O'Hare and Emma Goldman, to labor champion Eugene Debs, to a little-known but ambitious bureaucrat named J.

This was America during and after the Great War: a brief but appalling era blighted by lynchings, censorship, and the sadistic, sometimes fatal abuse of conscientious objectors in military prisons-a time whose toxic currents of racism, nativism, red-baiting, and contempt for the rule of law then flowed directly through the intervening decades to poison our own. When the government stepped in, it was often to fan the flames.

Some seventy-five newspapers and magazines were banned from the mail and forced to close. Self-appointed vigilantes executed tens of thousands of citizens' arrests. Courts threw thousands of people into prison for opinions they voiced-in one notable case, only in private.

Mobs burned Black churches to the ground. From legendary historian Adam Hochschild, a groundbreaking reassessment of the overlooked but startlingly resonant period between World War I and the Roaring Twenties, when the foundations of American democracy were threatened by war, pandemic, and violence fueled by battles over race, immigration, and the rights of labor.

American Midnight by Adam Hochschild