Jon Meacham Interview: Our Worst Instincts & Our Better Angels

Jon Meacham examines how fear emerges during times of anxiety, the causes and effects of McCarthyism, and the importance of empathy as a trait in our leaders and describes why he calls the Civil Rights Movement “the great domestic drama of the 20th century.”

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
Interview Date: August 03, 2019
Interviewed by: Katie Davison

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