Every Sunday at 2 p.m. ET (11 a.m. PT)
Upcoming Book Breaks
April
April 21 - Matthew J. Davenport on The Longest Minute: The Great San Francisco Earthquake and Fire of 1906
At 5:12 a.m. on April 18, 1906, a 7.9 magnitude earthquake struck San Francisco, catching most of the city asleep. For approximately one minute, shockwaves buckled streets, shattered water mains, collapsed buildings, crushed hundreds of residents to death, and trapped many alive. Fires ignited and blazed through dry wooden ruins and grew into a firestorm. The largest city in the American West was reduced to a large pile of rubble. What came next would inform urban planning, public health, and municipal governance for the rest of the century.
Matthew Davenport’s previous book, First Over There: The Attack on Cantigny, America’s First Battle of World War I, was a finalist for the 2015 Guggenheim-Lehrman Prize in Military History.
April 28 - James G. Basker on Black Writers of the Founding Era
May 5 - Anastasia C. Curwood on Shirley Chisholm: Champion of Black Feminist Power Politics
History Scholar of the Week
Middle and high school students (age 13 and up), submit your questions for one of the historians being featured on Book Breaks! If your question is chosen, you will be named History Scholar of the Week, and it will be announced live on the program! In addition, both you and your teacher will win a $50 gift certificate to the Gilder Lehrman Gift Shop. Your question can be about the book or the topic in general. Please submit only one question per program.
Submit your question here.
The deadline to submit a question for the upcoming Book Breaks is Thursday.
Book Breaks Archive
The Book Breaks archive contains more than three years of past programs featuring historians such as David Blight, H. W. Brands, Ken Burns, Eric Foner, Annette Gordon-Reed, Peniel Joseph, Jon Meacham, Elizabeth Varon, and more. Still deciding whether to subscribe? You can watch Harold Holzer’s talk on Brought Forth on This Continent: Abraham Lincoln and American Immigration (winner of the Lincoln Prize) below to help you make up your mind.
View the full archive of past sessions
The Institute thanks Citizen Travelers, the nonpartisan civic engagement initiative of The Travelers Companies, Inc., for its support of Book Breaks.