Charlottesville: An American Story by Deborah Baker ISBN 9781644453421, 1644453428 instant download

Charlottesville: An American Story by Deborah Baker ISBN 9781644453421, 1644453428 instant download

The events of August 11th and 12th 2017, in which a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville led to the murder of a young woman, are a flashpoint of recent American history. Pulitzer Prize finalist Deborah Baker has written a definitive, dramatic, panoptic, terrifying, and surprising account of what happened.

In this major work of social history, Baker focuses on the people of Charlottesville while tracing the paths of the far-right figures who planned and attended the rally. She tells the story of the civic leaders who debated the fate of a statue of Robert E. Lee; the Black clergy, who were divided about how to respond to the gathering threat; the university administrators and police who bungled the city's response; and the activists (including clergy, faculty, and city residents) who saw what was coming and tried to protect their community.

Baker also describes a similar event that took place a generation earlier, when a rabble rouser named John Kasper came to Charlottesville with the intention of starting a race war. Kasper was a protégée of famed poet and fascist sympathizer Ezra Pound. The story of Kasper and Pound, as well as of a Charlottesville housewife who crossed Kasper’s path, foreshadow what was to come. In Charlottesville , Baker joins these disturbing events to illustrate the fractious history of the United States and agitate the myths that have sustained us as a nation.