This is America – Is This America?

Book Presentation & Conversation with Johanna Roth, DIE ZEIT

By the time you turn 250, you’re supposed to have weathered the worst. But in the case of the U.S., things haven’t gone quite so smoothly: On this milestone birthday—with all the growing pains that come with it—Johanna Roth, *Die Zeit*’s foreign correspondent reporting from Washington, D.C., through 2025, examines the founding promise of 1776. “All people are equal,” it says—yet Roth finds a crack right in the foundation of the U.S. Constitution, carved by men who kept slaves at home. From Gettysburg to Guantánamo, from the Bear River Massacre to masked ICE agents who today round up people off the streets, she paints a picture of a country that has been telling itself the same myth for a quarter of a millennium—and may be transforming into precisely what it was never meant to become. With a critical, intelligent, and at times surprisingly tender eye, the journalist examines the American nation on its anniversary—and finds the last point of consensus between the red and blue camps: Dolly Parton, of course!