Fault Lines – serie

In the middle of the 1970s, America entered a new era of doubt and division. Major political, economic and social crises—Watergate, Vietnam, the rights revolutions of the 1960s–had cracked the existing social order. In the years that followed, the story of our own lifetimes would be written. Longstanding historical fault lines over income inequality, racial division and a revolution in gender roles and sexual norms would deepen and fuel a polarised political landscape. In Fault Lines, leading historians Kevin M. Kruse and Julian E. Zelizer reveal how the divisions of the present day began almost four decades ago, and how they were echoed and amplified by a fracturing media landscape that witnessed the rise of cable TV, the internet and social media.How did the United States become so divided? Fault Lines offers one of the few comprehensive, wide-angle history views towards an answer.

In this masterful history, leading historians and best-selling authors Kevin M. Kruse and Julian E. Zelizer uncover the origins of the current moment in America, answering the question: When—and how—did the country become so polarised? It starts in 1974 with the Watergate crisis, the OPEC oil embargo, desegregation, busing riots in Boston and the wind-down of the Vietnam War. Ever-widening historical fault lines over economic inequality, race, gender and sex norms firing up a polarised political landscape followed. Fault Lines is also the story of the profound transformations of the media and the political system fuelling the fire. This edition has been brought up to date with significant updates throughout, a new chapter on the Trump administration; and a new epilogue on the Biden administration and the 2024 general election.

A struggling singer-songwriter in Blackpool becomes the Lovely Assistant in an ominous magical act. A mother in Vancouver recounts her life and death. A widow in Edinburgh is summoned to confront the guilt that’s haunted him since childhood. Fault Lines presents three stories set in the three cities with their catalysts spanning three decades, all brought to you by Emmy-nominated animation veteran Robert Cullen (Danger Mouse, Foster’s Home for Imaginary Friends).

What if the universe is stitched together with absences? What if our deepest realities – personal, political, cosmic – are not shaped by grand ideas or all-encompassing ‘explanations’, but by the tiny, unremarked gaps between them?In this kaleidoscopic essay, Phil Smith covers some unlikely terrain: from the quantum unevenness of the cosmos to the haunted ruins of mines and the fragile misadventures of lost mariners. He rejects the siren call of big, smooth answers and plunges into the turbulent space where anomalies, coincidences and disturbances matter.Phil gathers stories, observations and practices from the disturbed edges of culture, ecology and everyday life – inviting us to attend to absences, to find hope in the vacuum and to experiment with living differently in the leaks and loopholes of existence.

When a schoolboy found the Lyme Bay astrolabe in 1967, a story which should have made headlines instead vanished from local memory. More than fifty years had passed before writer and activist Horatio Morpurgo began to ask why. The more he learnt about this rare navigational instrument and its recovery from the sea near his home, the more intrigued he became.The trail leads over unstable cliffs to dissenting chapels to a neglected story about Atlantic slavery and empire. Marine conservation, Extinction Rebellion and the politics of immigration: each has its say. He encounters sea fans, Mary Anning’s ink, John Fowles’ writing studio – and beneath these, faultlines as deep in the geology as they are in the culture.A Guide to the Unconformity is what happens when you ask one question of one short stretch of the coastline, then wait long enough for it to answer.