National Book Award Longlist for Nonfiction 2019. He has been a guest on Democracy Now!, The Charlie Rose Show, and the Chris Hayes Show. He received his BA from Brooklyn College, CUNY, in 1992 and his PhD from Yale in 1999. Grandin has served on the United Nations Truth Commission investigating the Guatemalan Civil War and has written for the Los Angeles Times, The Nation, The New Statesman, the Guardian, the London Review of Books, and The New York Times.

Philip Gourevitch describes it as a 'rare book in which the drama of the action and the drama of ideas are equally measured, a work of history and of literary reflection that is as urgent as it is timely.' Toni Morrison called Grandin's new work, The Empire of Necessity, 'compelling, brilliant and necessary.' Based on years of research on four continents, the book narrates the history of a slave-ship revolt that inspired Herman Melville's other masterpiece, Benito Cereno. A Professor of History at New York University, Grandin has published a number of other award-winning books, including Empire's Workshop, The Last Colonial Massacre, and The Blood of Guatemala. Greg Grandin is the author of Fordlandia, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. The border wall may or may not be built, but it will survive as a rallying point, an allegorical tombstone marking the end of American exceptionalism. It is this new reality, Grandin says, that explains the rise of reactionary populism and racist nationalism, the extreme anger and polarization that catapulted Trump to the presidency. And now, the combined catastrophe of the 2008 financial meltdown and our unwinnable wars in the Middle East have slammed this gate shut, bringing political passions that had long been directed elsewhere back home. But this deflection meant that the country's problems, from racism to inequality, were never confronted directly. For centuries, he shows, America's constant expansion-fighting wars and opening markets-served as a 'gate of escape,' helping to deflect domestic political and economic conflicts outward. history-from the American Revolution to the War of 1898, the New Deal to the election of 2016. In The End of the Myth, acclaimed historian Greg Grandin explores the meaning of the frontier throughout the full sweep of U.S. Today, though, America has a new symbol: the border wall.

Symbolizing a future of endless promise, it was the foundation of the United States' belief in itself as an exceptional nation-democratic, individualistic, forward-looking.

From a Pulitzer Prize winner, a new and eye-opening interpretation of the meaning of the frontier, from early westward expansion to Trump's border wall.Įver since this nation's inception, the idea of an open and ever-expanding frontier has been central to American identity.

The End of the Myth by Greg Grandin