From Desert Sun website:

2024 Rancho Mirage Writers Festival: Jon Meacham says ‘history is a tactile thing’

As a child growing up on a Civil War battlefield in Chattanooga, Tennessee, Jon Meacham would find spit bullets in the yard of the family home. It left him with the opinion that “history is a tactile thing.”

“The story of the country, to me, was not remote but quite real, and I fell in love with the story of how we got to where we are,” Meacham said during a recent interview.

Being immersed in U.S. history, Meacham—an author, historian and biographer—has chronicled the founding of America with a tender and inculcating voice on every page of his books on presidents, the Civil Rights Movement, the partnership between Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill during World War II, and moments when the country endured and overcame contention.

Celebrated presidential historian Jon Meacham will be appearing at the 2024 RMWF. His latest book is And There Was Light: Abraham Lincoln and the American Struggle.

This book tells the story of Lincoln from his birth on the Kentucky frontier in 1809 to his leadership during the Civil War to his tragic assassination in 1865: his rise, his self-education, his loves, his bouts of depression, his political failures, his deepening faith, and his persistent conviction that slavery must end. In a nation shaped by the courage of the enslaved of the era and by the brave witness of Black Americans, Lincoln’s story illustrates the ways and means of politics in a democracy, the roots and durability of racism, and the capacity of conscience to shape events.
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