The American Dream, Then and Now

Julian E. Zelizer is a Professor of History and Public Affairs at Princeton University. Considered one of the pioneers in the revival of American political history, his most recent book is The Fierce Urgency of Now: Lyndon Johnson, Congress, and the Battle for the Great Society. Fault Lines, written with fellow historian Kevin M Kruse, is a sweeping history of the past four decades of American history. It chronicles the origins of a United States increasingly riven by stark political partisanship and deep social divisions along lines of race, class, gender and sexuality. The book also explores the ways in which a fractured media landscape aggravated our divisions in politics and society. Douglas Brinkley, history commentator for CNN, contributing editor to Vanity Fair and American Heritage, and author, called Fault Lines “[…]a brilliant primer for understanding the troubling precedents for today’s mass American political dysfunction. Both historians are deeply informed and surefooted thinkers. A must-read foundational work for our time!”

Kevin M. Kruse is a Professor of History at Princeton University. He specializes in the political, social, and urban/suburban history of twentieth-century America, with a focus on conflicts over race, rights and religion and the making of modern conservatism. His most recent book, One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America, explored the making and meaning of American religious nationalism in the mid-twentieth century. Fault Lines, written with fellow historian Julian E. Zelizer, is a sweeping history of the past four decades of American history. It chronicles the origins of a United States increasingly riven by stark political partisanship and deep social divisions along lines of race, class, gender and sexuality. The book also explores the ways in which a fractured media landscape aggravated our divisions in politics and society. Douglas Brinkley, history commentator for CNN, contributing editor to Vanity Fair and American Heritage, and author, called Fault Lines “[…]a brilliant primer for understanding the troubling precedents for today’s mass American political dysfunction. Both historians are deeply informed and surefooted thinkers. A must-read foundational work for our time!”

Nicholas Lemann is Joseph Pulitzer II and Edith Pulitzer Moore Professor and Dean Emeritus at Columbia Journalism School and a staff writer for The New Yorker. His previous books include The Big Test: The Secret History of the American Meritocracy and The Promised Land: The Great Migration and How It Changed America. He is the author of Transaction Man: The Rise of the Deal and the Decline of the American Dream (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). Over the last generation, the United States has undergone seismic changes. Stable institutions have given way to frictionless transactions, which are celebrated no matter what collateral damage they generate. The concentration of great wealth has coincided with the fraying of social ties and the rise of inequality. How did all this come about? In Transaction Man, Nicholas Lemann explains the United States’―and the world’s―great transformation by examining three remarkable individuals who epitomized and helped create their eras. Lemann interweaves these fresh and vivid profiles with a history of the Morgan Stanley investment bank from the 1930s through the financial crisis of 2008, while also tracking the rise and fall of a working-class Chicago neighborhood and the family-run car dealerships at its heart. Incisive and sweeping, Transaction Man is the definitive account of the reengineering of America and the enormous impact it has had on us all.