Aug 10, 2017
Joining today’s episode is Nancy MacLean, an award-winning scholar
of the twentieth-century United States, whose new
book, “Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical
Right’s Stealth Plan for America,” has been described
by Publishers Weekly as “a thoroughly researched and
gripping narrative… [and] a feat of American intellectual and
political history.” Booklist called it “perhaps the best
explanation to date of the roots of the political divide that
threatens to irrevocably alter American government.” McClean
discusses her book with Professors Julian Zelizer and Sam Wang, as
well as the widely-publicized controversial debates that have
surrounded its publication. McClean responds to some of her critics
in an illuminating conversation. The author of four other books,
including “Freedom is Not Enough: The Opening of the American
Workplace” (2006) called by the Chicago
Tribune "contemporary history at its best,” and “Behind
the Mask of Chivalry: The Making of the Second Ku Klux
Klan,” named a New York Times "noteworthy" book of
1994, MacLean is the William H. Chafe Professor of History and
Public Policy at Duke University. Her articles and review essays
have appeared in American Quarterly, The Boston
Review, Feminist Studies, Gender & History, In These Times,
International Labor and Working Class History, Labor, Labor
History, Journal of American History, Journal of Women’s
History, Law and History Review, The Nation, the OAH
Magazine of History and many edited collections. MacLean’s
scholarship has received more than a dozen prizes and awards and
been supported by fellowships from the American Council of Learned
Societies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National
Humanities Center, the Russell Sage Foundation and the Woodrow
Wilson National Fellowships Foundation. In 2010, she was elected a
fellow of the Society of American Historians, which recognizes
literary distinction in the writing of history and biography. Also
an award-winning teacher and committed graduate student mentor, she
offers courses on post-1945 America, social movements, and public
policy history.