The New American Commentary

Key Points of Learning: 01. How British Anglicanism came to be replaced in the South by evangelical Christianity. 02. Trace the rise of abolitionism and antislavery societies, and the violent backlash of anti-abolitionists. 03. Investigate the vibrant musical culture of the postbellum South and the African musical elements that converged in the birth of ragtime and jazz, as well as the evolution of blues, country music, and gospel. The American South holds a special place in the minds of people around the world. The South’s extraordinarily colorful and dramatic history, its competing narratives of prosperity and cruelty, its role in the American Civil War, and its influence on the emerging conception of human rights are, for many, the stuff of legend.

Are we living the good life - and what defines good, anyway? Americans today are constructing a completely different framework for success than their parents' generation, using new metrics that TEDWomen speaker and columnist Courtney Martin has termed collectively the "New Better Off".

The Best American Magazine Writing 2020 brings together outstanding writing from in-depth reporting to incisive criticism. It features extraordinary globe-spanning journalism, including Sarah A. Topol on the genocide against the Rohingya (New York Times Magazine) and Erika Fry on the unintended consequences of a dengue fever vaccine (Fortune). In "India: Intimations of an Ending," Arundhati Roy excoriates the increasing authoritarianism under Modi (The Nation in partnership with Type Media Center). A Q&A with Pamela Colloff accompanies her piece detailing prosecutors' reliance on an untrustworthy jailhouse informant (New York Times Magazine in partnership with ProPublica), and a ProPublica series investigates the disaster that befell the USS Fitzgerald.