Heather Ann Thompson

was that the Obama moment could be his moment if he stoked those flames exactly right.

Well, I think from the beginning it has very much shaped who I am as a historian because, as you mentioned, I was a kid growing up in a city that was literally reviled by the nation and, frankly, the world.

Detroit had been dubbed the murder capital of the world historically.

And that was it, right?

There was no other questions.

I can remember, you know, any time I would talk to white folks that didn't live in the city, it was always, how can you live there?

Don't you feel scared?

Do you carry a weapon?

And there was such a disconnect for me growing up with the city that I knew, the school that I went to, the neighborhood that I grew up in, everybody who I knew who was

making the city in a pretty extraordinary place.

And somehow no one had any idea who that was or what that really looked like.

So from the beginning, I have always tried to think about what are the stories that we are not asking about, we don't hear about, because those are the stories that animate so much of American history.

That's a great question.

I felt doing...

Attica because I was writing that as we were in the grips of and trying to make sense of mass incarceration, trying to make sense of why this country locked up more people than any other country on the planet.

It felt pretty pressing to me to understand that deeper history of that.

But this moment felt

like the entire democracy is at stake, that we are now in a society where violence is unhinged, that damages everybody and all of the time.

And it did feel, I guess, more, I felt a little bit more pressing, like, we've got to understand how we got here.

And I feel that we are all trying to make sense of this moment in our way.