The Soul of America by
Jon Meacham was a solid book subtitled
The Battle for Our Better Angels.
With the idea for the book out of the current divisiveness in the country, with the flames of it fanned out of the White House, Meacham chronicles various periods of American history and tells the story of how we've been before in periods of strife and ugliness, and made it through. Some of the battles fought for good that are noted in the book are against people after the Civil War who wanted to make it as if the South had won, the influence of the Ku Klux Klan at the turn of the 20th Century, isolationists prior to WWII, McCarthyism after, and segregation after that.
The leaders who helped America through these tough periods are highlighted, from Lincoln, to Theodore Roosevelt, Harry Truman, the Kennedys, and Lyndon Johnson, with below some of the quotes that stood out from the book...
"Surely in the light of history, it is more intelligent to to hope rather than to fear, to try rather than to not try." - Eleanor Roosevelt
"The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice." - Martin Luther King Jr.
"You have to appeal to people’s best instincts, not their worst ones," and, especially fitting today, "the people have often made mistakes, but given time and the facts, they will make the corrections." - Harry Truman
