Charlottesville: An American Story

by Deborah Baker

Overview

In August 2017, over a thousand neo-Nazis, fascists, Klan members, and neo-Confederates descended on a small southern city to protest the pending removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee. Within an hour of their arrival, the city’s historic downtown was a scene of bedlam as armored far right cadres battled activists in the streets. Before the weekend was over, a neo-Nazi had driven a car into a throng of counterprotesters, killing a young woman and injuring dozens.

Pulitzer Prize finalist Deborah Baker has written a riveting and panoptic account of what unfolded that weekend, focusing less on the rally’s far right leaders than on the story of the city itself. University, local, and state officials, including law enforcement, were unable or unwilling to grasp the gathering threat. Clergy, activists, and organizers from all walks of life saw more clearly what was coming and, at great personal risk, worked to warn and defend their city.

To understand why their warnings fell on deaf ears, Baker does a deep dive into American history. In her research she discovers an uncannily similar event that took place decades before when an emissary of the poet and fascist Ezra Pound arrived in Charlottesville intending to start a race war. In Charlottesville, Baker shows how a city more associated with Thomas Jefferson than civil unrest became a flashpoint in a continuing struggle over our nation’s founding myths.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781644453414
Publisher:	Graywolf Press
Publication date:	06/03/2025
Pages:	432
Sales rank:	851,137
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Deborah Baker is the author of In Extremis: The Life of Laura Riding, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, as well as A Blue Hand; The Beats in India. She divides her time between Calcutta, Goa, and Brooklyn.

Editorial Reviews

In Charlottesville, the brilliant biographer Deborah Baker turns her deep understanding of character and her researcher’s eye to her hometown and the horrible events that unfolded there as fascism marched—and murdered—in August 2017. Baker offers us a new way of understanding the threat of the far right by surrounding it, in this heart-stopping and heartbreaking narrative, with a rich and complex story of how the everyday people of a small city fought for justice long before the tiki torches blazed. Charlottesville is essential history, reportage, and maybe how-to for all who care for that struggle.”—Jeff Sharlet, NYT bestselling author of The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War

“No work of nonfiction I have read over the past decade has moved me as much as Charlottesville. Seldom has one place and time come to stand so hauntingly for a country on the precipice of catastrophe. With the precision of a master pointillist painter, Deborah Baker puts human faces on the buried truths that imperil American democracy while also amplifying the unheeded voices of the kind of unsung citizens who may yet save it. A must-read feat of spellbinding storytelling that packs the power of prophetic truth.”—Nancy MacLean, author of Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America

Praise for Deborah Baker

“[Baker] keeps the big events always in view, dramatizing and humanizing the workings of history…in a way a novelist would—by making it a story of individuals.”—The Wall Street Journal

“Baker writes beautifully, and she’s done ample research….She crafts memorable portraits of dynamic, flawed men and women.”—San Francisco Chronicle

From the Publisher