Jon Meacham explains why all history comes out of conflict and explores how the soul of America is shaped by the dueling forces of “our better angels” and our worst instincts by drawing from examples that include: Reconstruction after the Civil War, the rise and fall of the KKK and the creation of the NAACP.

Jon Meacham is a renowned presidential historian, contributing writer for The New York Times Book Review, contributing editor at TIME, and a Pulitzer Prize-winning author. A member of the Council on Foreign Relations and of the Society of American Historians, Meacham is a distinguished visiting professor at Vanderbilt University. He has written for The New York Times op-ed page, The Washington Post, Vanity Fair, and Garden & Gun. Meacham is also a regular guest on “Morning Joe” and other broadcasts. Born in Chattanooga in 1969, Meacham graduated from The University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee, with a degree in English literature. He previously worked as a reporter for the Chattanooga Times, an editor-in-chief at Newsweek, and an executive editor at Random House. A trustee of the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, The McCallie School, and The Harpeth Hall School, Meacham chairs the National Advisory Council of the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University.

From the HBO / Kunhardt Film Foundation (KFF) Documentary “The Soul of America.” Based on Jon Meacham's bestseller that illuminates our present-day fraught political reality by exploring historical challenges, including the women's suffrage movement, the incarceration of Japanese Americans, McCarthyism, and the fight for Civil Rights.

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Jon Meacham, Presidential Biographer and Historian
Interviewed by: Katie Davison

Chapters:
00:00 Intro
00:07 Importance of implication
01:04 History out of conflict
02:25 The Constitution
04:18 The American experiment
07:09 Reconstruction
09:33 Appomattox
11:46 The Lost Cause
13:19 Uniting the Union
14:42 Lincoln
15:46 Andrew Johnson
17:13 The Civil War
18:22 Unite the Right rally
19:36 War of ideas
23:40 Confederate monuments
25:02 White supremacy
25:32 Religion in The Lost Cause
27:02 Fighting The Lost Cause
30:06 Importance of history
32:16 The KKK
43:55 Woodrow Wilson
44:51 The NAACP
45:32 W.E.B. Du Bois
47:40 Al Smith
48:58 Nativism
49:46 The Red Scare
51:58 Attacks on the press
53:39 Five elements that shape an era
55:30 Scopes trial
57:17 Fall of the KKK
01:00:31 Harding and Coolidge on race and equality
01:04:01 ​​Women’s suffrage movement
01:10:22 Women’s rights today
01:11:51 Patience and persistence
01:15:29 Listening to activists
01:16:39 FDR
01:26:09 Ego in the presidency
01:26:55 Populism in the 1930s
01:30:41 Fear in the 1930s
01:32:11 Totalitarianism
01:33:12 Woodrow Wilson and the Lost Cause
01:34:17 Birth of a Nation
01:35:39 Overcoming stereotypes
01:36:47 Growing up in the South
01:40:16 Cultivating curiosity
01:42:23 Grandfather’s influence
01:45:06 Journalism
01:48:23 Relationship with politics
01:50:57 Career trajectory
01:52:55 Finding journalism
01:54:54 Soul of America
01:57:21 Being a writer
01:59:13 Perennial forces in the 1920s
02:00:07 Politicians and their base
02:01:03 FDR
02:03:03 The presidency
02:04:11 Internment of Japanese Americans
02:06:26 The isolationist movement of the 1940s
02:08:42 Handling crisis
02:10:08 FDR’s death
02:12:15 Eleanor Roosevelt
02:13:42 The dual nature of reality
02:14:34 Joseph Stilwell
02:15:16 Learning from history
02:17:12 Social reform
02:18:35 Private and public working together
02:20:54 America’s extremes
02:21:55 McCarthyism
02:24:27 Politics as entertainment
02:25:08 Failure of McCarthyism
02:26:26 Conservative movements of the 1950s
02:27:33 Conspiracy theories of the 1950s
02:28:09 The Civil Rights Act
02:30:50 Civil Rights in the post-war era
02:32:08 Lyndon B. Johnson
02:40:06 Cause for change
02:41:53 MLK
02:42:34 The Selma Marches
02:45:54 George Wallace
02:50:35 Lyndon B. Johnson’s last speech
02:51:30 Divisiveness in American
02:53:51 Progress made between the 1860s and the 1960s
02:55:32 LBJ not running for re-election
02:56:23 Lessons

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