Simon Jenkins and Melissa Butcher

Veteran journalist Simon Jenkins and geographer and former journalist Professor Melissa Butcher discuss the United States past and present and reflect on how it has arrived at where it is today. Why is the US so divided and what does the future hold?

Jenkins, a former editor of the Evening Standard and The Times, is author of A Short History of America: From Tea Party to Trump. He takes the story from the continent’s inhabitants not the second inauguration of Trump. How did this huge land come to be dominated by English speakers? And how has it grappled with the contradictions between its idea of liberty and its history of genocide and slavery? What insights does its history offer into an increasingly divided nation.

Butcher is education programme director at the social enterprise Cumberland Lodge, professor emeritus of social and cultural geography at Birkbeck, University of London and a former journalist at the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. In The Trouble with Freedom: Love, Hate and America’s Future, she explains how Americans have been divided by the value that unites them – freedom. Ordinary people of all persuasions have come to feel that their freedom is under threat and, with it, the very soul of the nation. She says her journey across America led to her discovery that political conflict often arose out of very personal experiences of managing cultural change.