A groundbreaking new account of a pivotal period in American history: 1917-1921, when violence broke out across the home front during World War I and continued into its aftermath, fueled by the first Red Scare and battles over race, immigration, and the rights of labor. The nation was on the brink. Mobs burned Black churches to the ground. Courts threw thousands of people into prison for opinions they voiced--in one notable case, only in private. Self-appointed vigilantes executed tens of thousands of citizens' arrests. Some seventy-five newspapers and magazines were banned from the mail and forced to close. When the government stepped in, it was often to fan the flames.   This was America during and after the Great War: a brief but appalling era blighted by lynchings, censorship, and the sadistic, sometimes fatal abuse of conscientious objectors in military prisons--a time whose toxic currents of racism, nativism, red-baiting, and contempt for the rule of law then flowed directly through the intervening decades to poison our own. It was a tumultuous period defined by a diverse and colorful cast of characters, some of whom fueled the injustice while others fought against it: from the sphinxlike Woodrow Wilson, to the fiery antiwar advocates Kate Richards O'Hare and Emma Goldman, to labor champion Eugene Debs, to a little-known but ambitious bureaucrat named J. Edgar Hoover, and to an outspoken leftwing agitator--who was in fact Hoover's star undercover agent. It is a time that we have mostly forgotten about, until now.  In American Midnight , award-winning historian Adam Hochschild brings alive the horrifying yet inspiring four years following the U.S. entry into the First World War, spotlighting forgotten repression while celebrating an unforgettable set of Americans who strove to fix their fractured country--and showing how their struggles still guide us today.   Adam Hochschild is the author of a number of books, including Half the Way Home, The Mirror at Midnight, and The Unquiet Ghost. Three of his books, including King Leopold's Ghost, have been named Notable Books of the Year by the New York Times Book Review and Library Journal. Adam has also written for the New Yorker, Harper's, the New York Review of Books, the New York Times Magazine, Mother Jones, and the Nation. He teaches writing in the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California at Berkeley. He lives in San Francisco.