Behold, America

Behold, America is an early effort to write U.S. history from the perspective of the era of Donald J. Trump. Sarah Churchwell's clearly written and accessible book will attract general readers as well as students and scholars. Indeed, it has already been widely reviewed in newspapers and magazines. Focusing on the period from the lead-up to World War I to U.S. entry into World War II, Churchwell traces the intertwined history of two phrases that emerged during the period: “America first” and “the American dream.” “America first” is indelibly associated with the America First Committee, which opposed U.S. entry into World War II; its most prominent spokesman, the celebrity aviator Charles Lindbergh, was a white supremacist and Nazi sympathizer. But Churchwell traces the phrase back to the 1910s, when it was associated with nativist calls for “100% Americanism.” Behold, America presents the American dream as a countervailing ideal that meant more than simple materialistic advancement but asserted egalitarian values and emerged from concerns about the antidemocratic implications of enormous concentrations of wealth

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