Join Michael in his discussion with Adam Hochschild about his new book, American Midnight: The Great War, A Violent Peace and Democracy’s Forgotten Crisis. This most important book examines the period from 1917-1921, when the toxic undercurrents of racism, nativism, Red-baiting, and contempt for the rule of law flowed throughout American life.  Never was the raw underside of our nation’s life more revealingly on display during this critical time in our nation’s history and is all but forgotten even though there are so many parallels to the events of today.

Adam Hochschild was born in New York City. His father, Harold Hochschild, was of German Jewish descent; his mother, Mary Marquand Hochschild, was a Protestant, and an uncle by marriage, Boris Sergievsky, was a World War I fighter pilot in the Imperial Russian Air Force. His German-born paternal grandfather Berthold Hochschild founded the mining firm American Metal Company

Hochschild graduated from Harvard in 1963 with a BA in History and Literature. As a college student, he spent a summer working on an anti-government newspaper in South Africa and subsequently worked briefly as a civil rights worker in Mississippi during 1964. Both were politically pivotal experiences about which he would eventually write in his books Half the Way Home: A Memoir of Father and Son and Finding the Trapdoor: Essays, Portraits, Travels. He later was part of the movement against the Vietnam War, and, after several years as a daily newspaper reporter, worked as a writer and editor for the left-wing Ramparts magazine. In the mid-1970s, he was a co-founder of Mother Jones. Much of his writing has been about issues of human rights and social justice.

A longtime lecturer at the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley, Hochschild has also been a Fulbright Lecturer in India, Regents’ Lecturer at the University of California, Santa Cruz and Writer-in-Residence at the Department of History, University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He is married to sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild.

Michael Zeldin is a well-known and highly-regarded TV and radio analyst/commentator.

He has covered many high-profile matters, including the Clinton impeachment proceedings, the Gore v. Bush court challenges, Special Counsel Robert Muller’s investigation of interference in the 2016 presidential election, and the Trump impeachment proceedings.

In 2019, Michael was a Resident Fellow at the Institute of Politics at the Harvard Kennedy School, where he taught a study group on Independent Investigations of Presidents.

Previously, Michael was a federal prosecutor with the U.S. Department of Justice. He also served as Deputy Independent/ Independent Counsel, investigating allegations of tampering with presidential candidate Bill Clinton’s passport files, and as Deputy Chief Counsel to the U.S. House of Representatives, Foreign Affairs Committee, October Surprise Task Force, investigating the handling of the American hostage situation in Iran.

Michael is a prolific writer and has published Op-ed pieces for CNN.com, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Hill, The Washington Times, and The Washington Post.

Follow Michael on Twitter: @michaelzeldin

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