Samuel Freedman is a Professor at Columbia University and the award-winning author of ten books. In Into the Bright Sunshine he looks at the life of Hubert Humphrey, who would become Senator from Minnesota, Vice President to Lyndon Johnson, and the Democratic presidential nominee in 1968, who lost his bid for the presidency to Richard Nixon by less than one percentage point.

But it’s Humphrey’s early years that Samuel Freedman covers in his book, chronicling Humphrey’s humble beginnings in smalltown South Dakota and his move to Minneapolis, Minnesota, where Humphrey launched an activist political career that helped to change the trajectory of civil rights in America.