Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America

• Finalist for the National Book Award in Nonfiction

• Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Current Interest
• Winner of the Lannan Foundation Cultural Freedom Award
• Winner of the Lillian Smith Book Award
• Named the "Most Valuable Book" of 2017 by The Nation
• New York Times bestseller

Nancy MacLean is the William H. Chafe Professor of History and Public Policy at Duke University, and the award-winning author of several books, including Behind the Mask of Chivalry: The Making of the Second Ku Klux Klan; Freedom is Not Enough: The Opening of the American Workplace; The American Women’s Movement, 1945-2000: A Brief History with Documents; and Debating the American Conservative Movement: 1945 to the Present. She also served the editor of Scalawag: A White Southerner’s Journey through Segregation to Human Rights Activism.

Her scholarship has received more than a dozen major prizes and awards, and has 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. 

Her most recent book, about which she will speak, is Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America.  Booklist called it “perhaps the best explanation to date of the roots of the political divide that threatens to irrevocably alter American government.” The Guardian said: “It’s the missing chapter: a key to understanding the politics of the past half century.” Democracy in Chains was a finalist for the National Book Award, and the winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Award in Current Affairs, the Lannan Foundation Cultural Freedom Award, and the Lillian Smith Book Award. The Nation magazine named it the “Most Valuable Book” of the year.  

The first 100 attendees will receive a free copy of Democracy in Chains.