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After Life

A Collective History of Loss and Redemption in Pandemic America

ebook
1 of 1 copy available
1 of 1 copy available

After Life is a collective history of how Americans experienced, navigated, commemorated, and ignored mass death and loss during the global COVID-19 pandemic, mass uprisings for racial justice, and the near presidential coup in 2021 following the 2020 election. Inspired by the writers who documented American life during the Great Depression and World War II for the Works Progress Administration (WPA), the editors asked twenty-first-century historians and legal experts to focus on the parallels, convergences, and differences between the exceptional "long 2020", while it unfolds, and earlier eras in U.S. History.
Providing context for the entire volume, After Life's Introduction explains how COVID-19 and America's long history of inequality, combined with a corrupt and unconcerned federal government, produced one of the darkest times in our nation's history. Discussing the rise of the COVID-19 death toll in the United States, eventually exceeding the 1918 flu, the AIDS epidemic, and the Civil War, it ties public health, immigration, white supremacy, elections history, and epidemics together, and provides a short history of the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020 and the beginnings of a Third Reconstruction.
After Life documents how Americans have dealt with grief, pain, and loss, both individually and communally, and how we endure and thrive. The title is an affirmation that even in our suspended half-living during lockdowns and quarantines, we are a nation of survivors—with an unprecedented chance to rebuild society in a more equitable way.
Contributors include: Gwendolyn Hall, Heather Ann Thompson, Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, Keith Ellison, Keri Leigh Merritt, Martha Hodes, Mary Kathryn Nagle, Mary L. Dudziak, Monica Muñoz Martinez, Peniel E. Joseph, Philip J. Deloria, Rhae Lynn Barnes, Robert L. Tsai, Robin D. G. Kelley, Scott Poulson-Bryant, Stephen Berry, Tera W. Hunter, Ula Y. Taylor, and, Yohuru Williams.

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    • Booklist

      September 15, 2022
      As America plods through a third pandemic year, with a new variant ascending and the prospect of an updated vaccine on the horizon, the scope of what we have lost is difficult to grasp. After Life strives to make meaning of the last few years by placing its events in historical, individual, and societal contexts. The volume is not a comprehensive history of COVID or intended to be one. Rather, its 19 essays offer histories and remembrances that range from Gwendolyn Midlo Hall's reconsideration of the 1873 Colfax Massacre in light of the backlash to the 2020 election, to Robin D. G. Kelley's deeply personal obituary of his estranged and violent father, who died just before the March 2020 lockdowns. These essays seek to understand how we got here, document the pandemic's impact on the lives of regular Americans, and write early drafts of the history of such cataclysmic pandemic-era events as June 2020's Black Lives Matter rallies and January 2021's white nationalist uprising at the U.S. Capitol. After Life is timely, compassionate, and necessary.

      COPYRIGHT(2022) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

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  • English

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