Robert S. McElvaine

"In a lively, lucid, and fast-paced narrative, Robert McElvaine summons the past to illuminate today's existential threats to democracy—and the resources that might help us surmount them. In the hands of this gifted storyteller, 1964 becomes a prism through which to see the present with fresh eyes, just in time to save the future."

– Nancy MacLean, author of 

   Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of 

      the Radical Right's Stealth Plan for America 

“As Marx turned Hegel upside down, so McElvaine overturns Aristotle, Marx, Freud, and even Darwin in showing us how biological and cultural evolution need no longer see men and women as opposites or unequal. Eve’s Seed is a revelation, engagingly and imaginatively written.” – Carl Degler, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian

In the twenty-five years since its publication, critics and scholars have praised historian Robert McElvaine's sweeping and authoritative history of the Great Depression as one of the best and most readable studies of the era. Combining clear-eyed insight into the machinations of politicians and economists who struggled to revive the battered economy, personal stories from the average people who were hardest hit by an economic crisis beyond their control, and an evocative depiction of the popular culture of the decade, McElvaine paints an epic picture of an America brought to its knees—but also brought together by people's widely shared plight.

“There’s nothing more deeply moving than reading the words and thus hearing the voices of the actual survivors of hard times. McElvaine has captured these voices as no one else ever has.” – Studs Terkel