Everybody and welcome to democracy-ish.

I'm your host with Jha-T-Lee, and my wonderful co-host, Danielle Moody, is relaxing and chilling with her much well-deserved rest. But I am lucky to be joined by my friend

here, the excellent, informed and brilliant journalist and professor Samuel G. Friedman. He is an

award-winning author, a former columnist for The New York Times, a professor at Columbia University,

and the author of 10, count of 10 acclaimed

books, including a fascinating book that is coming out this week called Into the Bright

Sunshine, Young Hubert Humphrey, and the Fight for Civil Rights. Samuel, thank you for joining me,

sir. It's great to be with you, watch out.

You know, so here we are, it's the year 2023.

You've written 10 books.

And your 10th book, which is out this week,

you know, you decided to take the DeLorean

all the way back 75 years.

And I'm sitting here thinking, Sam, you know, there's a lot of stuff happening.

There's a rise of fascism, the mainstreaming of white nationalism,

the mainstream of anti-Semitism, our democracy is under attack.

The world is on fire.

Why or why did you set your microscope 75 years ago at the Democratic Convention of 1948?

You know, it's weird how time sometimes meets you in ways you can't predict.

When I started this book about Hubert Humphrey and the civil rights battles of the 1940s,

I thought I was engaging in just a work of history.

I thought I was filling in some important gaps about what a lot of Americans, even those

...