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, the Gold Medal of the California Book Awards, 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. Links to recent articles and book presentations of his appear below. 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.

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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.

 

Selected recent articles by Adam Hochschild:

*The Cult of J. Edgar Hoover (The Nation)

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

*A Forgotten Assault on the Constitution (The Boston Globe)

*What Might Have Been (The Nation)

* 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)

 

Audio/Visual Presentations of Adam Hochschild’s Books:

    

 

 

    

 

(Photo of Adam Hochschild by Barbi Reed)

PUBLICATIONS & OTHER WORK

TEACHING SCHEDULE:

Sec.	Title	Time	Location
1	J243 Advanced Narrative Writing Spring 2019	Tu 10:00 - 1:00	B30 North Gate — B30 North Gate
007	J298 Advanced Narrative Writing Spring 2022	Tu 10:00 - 1:00	106 North Gate (Upper News) — 106 North Gate (Upper News)
007	J298 Advanced Narrative Writing Spring 2023	Tu 10am–1pm	209 North Gate (Greenhouse) — 209 North Gate (Greenhouse)

MEDIA PLATFORMS

Narrative Writing