Braver Angels Book Club: Robert Putnam's "The Upswing"

Book Club Topic:
The Upswing: How America Came Together a Century Ago and How WE Can Do It Again (2019) by Robert Putnam & Shaylyn Romney Garrett

• Note: Unlike the Free Library events, this is not a lecture by the author. This is an online group discussion about the book.

Registering for the Online Event:
This is a FREE event; however, you will need to register for it. Go to the following Zoom link & fill out the registration form, and when you hit "register" you'll receive an email with a link to the Zoom meeting room 24 hours before the event starts:
https://braverangels-org.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJcode6sqz8iHtKeKTN1i7-H7XQtUE0esEa-

What is "Braver Angels"?
Formerly known as "Better Angels", Braver Angels is an organization founded in 2016 to depolarize American politics through grassroots organizing. They do this primarily by hosting events for cross-partisan dialogue & civil debate. To learn more, go to https://braverangels.org/

Who is the Organizer for this Event?
Jennifer Livingston - library@braverangels.org

Who are the Authors?

• Robert Putnam is a Professor Emeritus of Public Policy at Harvard University. He has written fifteen books, translated into twenty languages, including the best-selling Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (2000), which analyzed the long-term decline in America's "social capital", and more recently, Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis (2015), a groundbreaking examination of the growing opportunity gap. His earlier book, Making Democracy Work (1993), was praised by the Economist as “a great work of social science, worthy to rank alongside de Tocqueville, Pareto and Weber.”

• Shaylyn Romney Garrett is a writer and social entrepreneur who holds a BA magna cum laude in Government from Harvard University. Along with The Upswing which she co-authored with Robert Putnam, her work also includes the uniquely revealing portraits of religious communities across the United States in Robert Putnam & David E. Campbell's book American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us, which won Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson Award for best political science book of 2010-11. She's a founding contributor to David Brooks’s Aspen Institute initiative, "Weave: The Social Fabric Project."

What Should We Know About the Book?
Deep and accelerating inequality; unprecedented political polarization; vitriolic public discourse; a fraying social fabric; public and private narcissism—Americans today seem to agree on only one thing: This is the worst of times.

But we’ve been here before... During the Gilded Age of the late 1800s, America was highly individualistic, starkly unequal, fiercely polarized, and deeply fragmented, just as it is today. However as the twentieth century opened, America became—slowly, unevenly, but steadily—more egalitarian, more cooperative, more generous; a society on the upswing, more focused on our responsibilities to one another and less focused on our narrower self-interest. Sometime during the 1960s, however, these trends reversed, leaving us in today’s disarray.

In their recent book, The Upswing: How America Came Together a Century Ago and How We Can Do It Again (2020), Putnam & Garrett analyze a remarkable confluence of trends that brought us from an “I” society to a “We” society and then back again. They draws inspiring lessons for our time from an earlier era, when a dedicated group of reformers righted the ship, putting us on a path to becoming a society once again based on community.

NOTE: You don't have to read the book prior to attending the discussion, but if you're interested in exploring the authors ideas in depth, it's certainly worth your time. For a basic overview, check out the authors' 1-hour interview with Jeffrey Rosen at the National Constitution Center:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F3Cecvy1Z1k