This Thursday - A NATION FORGED BY CRISIS

This Thursday, Skylark is proud to host the launch party of a new book that has been garnering a lot of interest nationwide and which was recently named as the Best History Book of 2018 by WORLD magazine: A NATION FORGED BY CRISIS, by MU historian Jay Sexton.

In the book, Sexton contends that our national narrative is not one of halting yet inevitable progress, but of repeated disruptions brought about by shifts in the international system. Sexton shows that the American Revolution was a consequence of the increasing integration of the British and American economies; that a necessary precondition for the Civil War was the absence, for the first time in decades, of foreign threats; and that we cannot understand the New Deal without examining the role of European immigrants and their offspring in transforming the Democratic Party.

A necessary corrective to conventional narratives of American history, A NATION FORGED BY CRISIS argues that we can only prepare for our unpredictable future by first acknowledging the contingencies of our collective past.

This will be a fascinating discussion you won’t want to miss! (Food and drink will be provided, courtesy of the Kinder Institute for Constitutional Democracy.) The event begins at 6:30 and the program will begin at 7:00. Books, of course, will be available for purchase and signing by the author.

Jay Sexton is the Kinder Institute Chair in Constitutional Democracy at the University of Missouri and emeritus fellow at Corpus Christi College, Oxford University. The author of The Monroe Doctrine and Debtor Diplomacy, Sexton lives in Columbia, Missouri.