Adam Hochschild

Lecturer

Continuing Lecturer

Adam Hochschild (pronunciation: ”Hoch” as in ”spoke”; ”schild” as in ”build”) is the author of eleven books. American Midnight: The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy’s Forgotten Crisis is his most recent. His preceding book, the biography Rebel Cinderella: From Rags to Riches to Radical, the Epic Journey of Rose Pastor Stokes, was published in 2020.  Spain in Our Hearts: Americans in the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939, appeared in 2016. Of his earlier books, Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire’s Slaves won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the PEN USA Literary Award, and was a finalist for the National Book Award. King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa and To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918 were both finalists for the National Book Critics Circle Award. His Finding the Trapdoor: Essays, Portraits, Travels and the recent Lessons from a Dark Time and Other Essays collect his shorter pieces, including magazine reporting from five continents.

Earlier in his career, he was a reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle, a commentator on National Public Radio’s “All Things Considered,” and a co-founder, editor, and writer at Mother Jones magazine.  He has received the Theodore Roosevelt-Woodrow Wilson Award from the American Historical Association and in 2014 was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is a three-time winner of the California Book Awards’ Gold Medal for Nonfiction.

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The New York Times Book Review has featured Hochschild as the subject of its weekly “By the Book” interview. At the Graduate School of Journalism, former PBS NewsHour correspondent Elizabeth Farnsworth talked with Hochschild about his work (interview starts at 6:00 minutes into the video recording),  and in Bunia, Democratic Republic of Congo,  Scott Pelley of “60 Minutes” spoke with him about his writing about that country. Terry Gross of NPR’s “Fresh Air” has done interviews with Hochschild  about American Midnight, about Spain in Our Hearts and about To End All Wars. The late Studs Terkel’s audio archive contains his interview with Hochschild about Half the Way Home.

In 2012, Hochschild was honored for the body of his work by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Here are excerpts from a statement he made on that occasion.

 

Audio/Visual Presentations of selected books by Adam Hochschild:

   

 

 

    

 

Selected recent articles by Adam Hochschild:

 

Healing in Prison (Mother Jones)

Two Forgotten Colonial Wars (The Atlantic; Times Literary Supplement)

Commander-in-Chief of the Lost Cause (New York Review of Books)

  It Can’t Happen Here (Smithsonian)

 History Wars–The Latest Round (New York Review of Books)

 The Cult of J. Edgar Hoover (The Nation)

‘They Have No Objection to Being Killed’ (New York Review of Books)

 In the Ukraine War, Russia’s History Casts a Long Shadow (The Atlantic)

Are the Proud Boys about Race–or Women? (New York Times Book Review)

  Gone With the Wind: Frankly, Should We Give a Damn? (New Statesman)

  Who’s to Blame? (New York Review of Books)

  The 1619 Project (New York Times Book Review)

  Midnight in the Statue Storage Vault (San Francisco Chronicle)

Teaching Restorative Justice, One Hallway Fight at a Time (Mother Jones)

When Museums Have Ugly Pasts (The Atlantic)

When Mass Deportations Were Planned a Century Ago, One Man Got in the Way (New Yorker)

Visiting Finland’s Prisons–and Ours (New York Review of Books)

If You Think the First World War Began Senselessly, Consider How it Ended (New Yorker)

A Nation of Guns (New York Review of Books)

 Rape of the Congo (New York Review of Books)

Blood and Treasure in Eastern Congo (Mother Jones)

Tarzan and Me (Tomdispatch.com)

 

(Photo of Adam Hochschild by Barbi Reed)

PUBLICATIONS & OTHER WORK

TEACHING SCHEDULE:

Sec.	Title	Time	Location
012	J298 Narrative Longform Master’s Project Seminar Spring 2025	Tues 2–5 p.m.	127 North Gate (Rodriguez Room) — 127 North Gate (Rodriguez Room)
004	J298 Narrative Longform Master’s Project Seminar (Every other week) Fall 2024	Tue, 2pm-5pm	127 North Gate (Rodriguez Room) — 127 North Gate (Rodriguez Room)
001	J219 Narrative Longform Master’s Project Seminar Spring 2024	Wed 1–4 (every other week)	127 North Gate (Rodriguez Room) — 127 North Gate (Rodriguez Room)
011	J298 Advanced Narrative (Every Other Week) Fall 2023	W 1–4pm	127 North Gate (Rodriguez Room) — 127 North Gate (Rodriguez Room)

MEDIA PLATFORMS

Narrative Writing