A Nation Still Becoming

Every generation of Americans has inherited a country in the middle of an argument it did not start — and has been asked to carry that argument forward. The conflict that animates this book is the oldest in American public life: the tension between the collective good and individual liberty, between the nation's stated ideals and the distance still to travel before those ideals describe lived reality. From Reconstruction through the Progressive Era, the New Deal, the civil rights movement, the Reagan revolution, and the culture wars of the twenty-first century, that tension has been the engine of American political change. A Nation Still Becoming offers an accessible, narrative-driven survey of modern American politics and culture from the late nineteenth century to the present — written not for scholars but for readers who want to understand, in plain language, how the country arrived at this particular moment. It moves through the pivotal episodes that shaped the national character: the convulsive transformation of industrialization, which created the first billionaires and the first mass labor movement in the same decade; the New Deal's redefinition of what Americans could expect from their government; the post-war consensus that produced the middle class and the Cold War simultaneously; and the fracturing of that consensus in the 1960s into a culture war that has never fully resolved.