How the heck did our politics get here? Historian Rick Perlstein has the answer in his fourth book, 'Reaganland.'

CHICAGO — There is a historian who lives in Edgewater who is changing the way we think about American political history. Specifically, he’s been altering the way we think about the 60-year rise of the conservative right, from its floundering days of Barry Goldwater to the Reagan Revolution, depositing seeds that rose into a Trump. His name is Rick Perlstein and he’s become, as Slate put it, “the pre-eminent historian of modern conservatism.” Yet he was never an academic, and has never taught regularly. His research of choice is more likely to be a mountain of old newspapers than legislation, a...

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