American Depression

It's been six months since Cassidy Rain Berghoff’s best friend, Galen, died, and up until now she has succeeded in shutting herself off from the world. But when controversy arises around Aunt Georgia’s Indian Camp in their mostly white midwestern community, Rain decides to face the outside world again, with a new job photographing the campers for her town’s newspaper.

In The Four Threats, Lieberman and Mettler explore five historical episodes when democracy in the United States was under siege: the 1790s, the Civil War, the Gilded Age, the Depression, and Watergate. These episodes risked profound, even fatal, damage to the American democratic experiment, and on occasion antidemocratic forces have prevailed. From this history, four distinct characteristics of democratic disruption emerge. Political polarization, racism and nativism, economic inequality, and excessive executive power...have threatened the survival of the republic.

Roosevelt's presidency was one of the most eventful in U.S. history. He took office in the midst of economic crisis: the stock market had crashed and millions of Americans were unemployed. He demonstrated an optimism and resolve that garnered quick support for his administration and for the programs that he called the New Deal. The first president truly to understand the power of the new mass media, Roosevelt rallied the nation through "fireside chats" on the radio and speeches on movie house newsreels.