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By the FMNN founder
Book One of the four-volume The Death of the American Dream covers 1493 to 1989. It's on preorder now as an EPUB ebook and releases Sat., Oct. 31.
Every generation hears that its crisis is new. Roots opens with a Gilded Age prologue that makes three claims from the record:
the country has been this concentrated before
it became less concentrated on purpose, through specific policy choices with names and dates
it has spent the last several decades becoming this concentrated again
The rest of the four-volume series measures itself against that prologue.
Book One runs 53 chapters in three Parts:
Foundations (1493–1934)
The Exception (1935–1969)
Mobilization (1970–1989)
It starts with the Doctrine of Discovery in American property law and ends in 1989, as the Religious Right turns to grassroots organizing.
What's inside
The record the textbooks buried. The first and second Klans, Colfax and Cruikshank, and the coups and massacres at Wilmington, Elaine, Tulsa and Rosewood.
The exception America mistook for normal. The New Deal's color line, redlining and the manufactured wealth gap, peak labor and Taft-Hartley.
The movement and the backlash. From Emmett Till to Selma, Brown v. Board and Massive Resistance, the Southern Strategy, and COINTELPRO and the state Sovereignty Commissions.
The counter-offensive. The Powell Memorandum, Roe and abortion politics, Phyllis Schlafly and the ERA, the founding of the Moral Majority, and "Christian Nationalism: An Identity, Measured."
The Reagan years. The 1981 tax cut, PATCO and the Volcker shock, the AIDS crisis, Iran-Contra, and the airwaves before deregulation.
Close to home
Four chapters are set right here:
"The Cigar City: Ybor, the Lectores and the Vigilantes, 1886–1935" (Chapter 7)
"One City's Color Line: St. Petersburg, 1931–1968" (Chapter 23)
"The Other Side of the Bay: Tampa, from Zion Cemetery to Central Avenue, 1900–1967" (Chapter 24)
"Strike and Highway: St. Petersburg, 1968–1975" (Chapter 29)
How it's built
Every claim is held to three tiers: documented intent, documented effect, and genuine interpretive dispute. Each is labeled and backed by endnotes.
Every chapter ends with "Reading the Pattern," which names which of the series' six recurring moves the chapter's own facts show:
gain, then alarm
neutral words, targeted effect
force under color of law
the official story
accountability delayed and partial
reform, then rollback
The Preface describes the method in one line: the series "lets the pattern that emerges, era by era, make its own case."
Who it's for
Roots is where the series starts. Read it to see where the playbook came from before it showed up on the evening news. If you buy one book, start here.
Get Roots: $12.99 EPUB ebook at floridamannewsnetwork.com/books. All four volumes are $29.99 as a set on preorder through Oct. 30, then $32.99.
Disclosure: FMNN's founder wrote this four-volume series, which FMNN publishes and sells.