The Register Citizen (Torrington, CT)
Historian is guest for Conversations on the Green
WASHINGTON — A Pulitzer Prize-winning writer and historian who has writen presidential biographies with heroic perspectives of leaders on both side of the political abyss, Jon Meacham is the featured guest for “The Soul of America,” the finale of the eighth season of Conversations on the Green, at 3 p.m. Oct. 25.
Moderated by former NBC correspondent and national talk show host Jane Whitney, the interactive hour-long conversation will be presented online, allowing anyone with an internet-connected device to participate and ask questions.
Tickets to the virtual event can be booked at www.conversationsonthegreen.com. All proceeds benefit the American Nurses Foundation Coronavirus Response Fund, New Milford Hospital, Greenwoods Counselling & Referrals, and the Susan B Anthony Project.
Meacham’s latest work, “His Truth Is Marching
On: John Lewis and the Power of Hope,” is an intimate portrait of the late civil rights icon and links his life to the painful quest for justice in America from the 1950s to the present, according to a statement. Drawing on decades of wide-ranging interviews with the late congressman, Meacham recounts how this son of an Alabama tenant farmer and greatgrandson of a slave was inspired by his teachers, Reverend James Lawson and Martin Luther King,
Jr., to put his life on the line in the service of what Abraham Lincoln called “the better angels of our nature,” according to the statement.
In foreshadowing the current tumult in the long struggle for racial equality, Meacham also was the editor for Voices in Our Blood: America's Best on the Civil Rights Movement that was released in 2001. Spanning the period from 1941 to 1998, the book includes writings of noted civil-rights leaders, novelists, and journalists, like James Baldwin, William Faulkner, David Halberstam and John Lewis, according to the statement.
Meacham, the author of 14 books, has explored America's leaders in such works as Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power as well as his biography of Andrew Jackson, “American Lion,”, which won the 2009 Pulitzer for Biography or Autobiography. Noted for his research and for combining anecdotal information with current historical interpretations, the Bush family chose him to be the official biographer of the late President George H.W. Bush. The ensuring book, “Destiny and Power: The American Odyssey of George Herbert Walker Bush”, was published in 2015 and Meacham gave eulogies for both President Bush and his wife, Barbara Bush, when they died in 2018.
“The current climate of partisan fury portending a pivotal election is best presaged in his book, ‘The Soul of America,’ a hopeful portrayal of the country’s gestalt in which he shows how the “better angels of our nature” have repeatedly won the day,” according to the statement. “He brings to life the crises of American history with surprising portraits of Lincoln and other presidents - including Ulysses S. Grant, Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, and Lyndon B. Johnson - and illuminates the courage of such influential citizen activists as Martin Luther King, Jr., early suffragettes Alice Paul and Carrie Chapman Catt, civil rights pioneers Rosa Parks, First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, and Army-McCarthy hearings lawyer Joseph N. Welch.
“He writes about the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the birth of the Lost Cause; the backlash against immigrants in the First World War and the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s; the fight for women’s rights; the demagoguery of Huey Long and Father Coughlin and the isolationist work of America First in the years before World War II; the anti-Communist witchhunts led by Senator Joseph McCarthy; and Lyndon Johnson’s crusade against Jim Crow,” the statement reads. “He shows how each of these dramatic hours in our national life have been shaped by the contest to lead the country to look forward rather than back, to assert hope over fear — a struggle that continues even now.”