Sarah Churchwell Interviewed by Nick Higham

Cultural historian Professor Sarah Churchwell explains the divisions ripping apart United States society through one of the most popular stories of all time, Gone with the Wind.

Churchwell says histories of mythmaking have informed America’s racial and gender politics including controversies over Confederate statues, resurgence of white nationalism, Black Lives Matter, the power of the American Dream, and the violence of Trumpism. She says the racism in Gone with the Wind is as controversial today as it was when it was first published in 1936. And she looks at 160 years of American denialism from the Lost Cause of the Confederacy to romances behind the Ku Klux Klan, and the erasure of interwar fascism.

Churchwell is professor of American literature and public understanding of the humanities at the School of Advanced Studies, University of London. She has been a judge for the Booker Prize, the Baillie Gifford Prize, and the Women’s Prize for Fiction, and is author of The Many Lives of Marilyn Monroe, Careless People: Murder, Mayhem and the Invention of The Great Gatsby, and Behold America: A History of America First and the American Dream. Here she talks to journalist Nick Higham, who was the BBC’s first ever media correspondent and is a former presenter of Meet the Author on the BBC news channel.