This is an encore presentation.
On February 18, 1965, an overflowing crowd packed the Union at England’s Cambridge University to witness a historic televised debate between James Baldwin, the leading literary voice of the civil rights movement, and William F. Buckley Jr., America's most influential conservative intellectual.
Nicholas Buccola's The Fire Is upon Us is the first book to tell the full story of the event, the radically different paths that led Baldwin and Buckley to it, the controversies that followed, and how the debate and the decades-long clash between the two men continues to illuminate America's racial divide today.
Dr. Buccola is the Elizabeth & Morris Glicksman Chair in Political Science at Linfield College in McMinnville, Oregon. In addition to The Fire Is upon Us, he’s also the author of The Political Thought of Frederick Douglass and the editor of The Essential Douglass, and Abraham Lincoln and Liberal Democracy. His essays have appeared in scholarly journals & The New York Times, Salon, & Baltimore Sun, among others.