Jonathan Kaufman with Jill Abramson: When America Roared

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The panoramic story of the 1980s, exploring the triumphs and failures of the decade that shaped the 21st century more than any other, from a Pulitzer Prize winning reporter who witnessed the transformations firsthand
In January 1980, America seemed broken. Inflation raged. Interest rates topped 20 percent. Americans were held hostage in Iran. The Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan with impunity. Japan was eating American manufacturing alive. Three networks controlled what Americans watched. China had been closed for 30 years.
Ten years later, everything had changed. The economy was booming. The Soviet Empire was collapsing. American businesses were competitive again.
In this immersive, character-driven narrative, Jonathan Kaufman lays bare the contending ideologies—and people—who battled for control of business, media and politics in the 1980s, shaping the way we live today. As Ronald Reagan and conservatives pummeled the Democratic party, as Jack Welch redefined leadership at Fortune 500 companies, and as deregulation spearheaded by Mark Fowler allowed television to become the hundreds of specialized and partisan channels we watch now, the groundwork was laid for our current economic and political conflicts. The decade also launched transformative social and political movements. Karen Nussbaum and Jane Fonda galvanized a struggling women’s movement, Evan Wolfson spearheaded the gay community’s legal fight against a hostile government, and Barack Obama cut his teeth as a community organizer in Chicago—all building long-lasting movements whose success progressives can learn from today.
From pivotal moments in board rooms and court rooms, to cultural touchstones like the birth of hip hop and of conservative talk radio, as well as the author’s eyewitness experiences in Tiananmen Square and Prague, When America Roared is the riveting story of how the 1980s built the world we live in, for better and for worse. It is the decade that made us—and the key to understanding where we go from here.

Jill Abramson leads the Burnes Center’s Initiative on Investigative Solutions Journalism. She is a journalist who spent 17 years in the most senior editorial positions at The New York Times, where she was the first woman to serve as Washington bureau chief, managing editor, and executive editor. She is a contributing columnist to the Boston Globe. Before joining the Times, she was deputy Washington bureau chief and an investigative reporter covering money and politics at The Wall Street Journal for nine years. She was the editor of Legal Times in Washington, D.C. She is the author of six books, including Strange Justice, which she wrote with Jane Mayer and Merchants of Truth, a narrative history of the digital transition of the news media. From 2015-2019 she also wrote a weekly political column for The Guardian. Random House in 2021 and 2022 published two books she wrote for middle-schoolers, What Is Congress and What is the Supreme Court. Recent articles by Abramson have been published in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe and the Columbia Journalism Review, among others. She has been a frequent political commentator for BBC News. She has won many journalism awards and a Bok Award for her successful teaching. Prior to joining Northeastern, she taught in Harvard’s English department as a lecturer on nonfiction narrative writing and journalism, In past years, she taught undergraduate writing seminars at Yale and Princeton. Abramson is a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and The American Philosophical Society. She served on the boards of the Columbia University School of Journalism, Pro Publica and the Knight-Wallace Foundation. She is a 1976 graduate of Harvard. She grew up in New York City, is married and has two children.

Jonathan Kaufman is a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter who has written and reported on China for thirty years for The Boston Globe, where he covered the 1989 massacre in Tiananmen Square; The Wall Street Journal, where he served as China bureau chief from 2002 to 2005; and Bloomberg News. He is the author of A Hole in the Heart of the World: Being Jewish in Eastern Europe and Broken Alliance: The Turbulent Times Between Blacks and Jews in America, winner of the National Jewish Book Award. He is director of the School of Journalism at Northeastern University in Boston.

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