Stan’s guest this week is historian and journalist David Greenberg of Rutgers University, talking about his new tour-de-force biography of Civil Rights icon and longtime Georgia Congressman, John Lewis: A Life, published by Simon & Schuster. Greenberg interviewed Lewis and 275 others, including Presidents Clinton and Obama, about Lewis’s rise from Alabama poverty to Bloody Sunday to public servant, the man deemed the Moral Conscious of the Congress.
Stan’s guest this week is historian Paul Pressly, discussing his new book, A Southern Underground Railroad: Black Georgians and the Promise of Spanish Florida and Indian Country, published by the University of Georgia Press. It’s a tale of how enslaved men and women found freedom and human dignity outside the expanding boundaries of the United States, crossing the borders and boundaries that separated the Lowcountry from the British and Spanish in coastal Florida and from the Seminole and Creek people in the vast interior of the Southeast.
Stan interviews Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Steven Hahn about his latest book, Illiberal America: A History, which argues that what happened on January 6, 2021, was not an aberration but has deep roots in the American past.
Stan’s guest this week is historian Evan Friss, author of the bestselling new release, The Bookshop: A History of the American Bookstore, which has been getting rave reviews in national publications. The story begins with Benjamin Franklin’s first bookstore in Philadelphia and takes us to a range of booksellers including the Strand in New York, Chicago’s Marshall Field & Company, the Gotham Book Mart, specialty stores like Oscar Wilde and Drum and Spear, sidewalk sellers of used books, Barnes & Noble, Amazon Books, and Parnassus. “A thoroughly engaging, delightful excursion into the wondrous world of books.”
Stan interviews veteran New York Times reporter Adam Nagourney about his recent book, The Times: How the Newspaper of Record Survived Scandal, Scorn, and the Transformation of Journalism, a sweeping behind-the-scenes look at the last four turbulent decades of “the paper of record,” as it confronted world-changing events, internal scandals, and the existential threat of the internet.
