As Americans continued to grasp what led up to the threat made on Donald Trump's life,

Judy Woodruff sought some perspective on how this moment of violence and deep division

relates to the country's past.

It's the latest in her ongoing series, America at a Crossroads.

Kevin Boyle is a professor of American history at Northwestern University and author of the 2021 book The Shattering America in the 1960s.

I traveled to Chicago to ask him about the parallels he sees between our own time and that

tumultuous period which witnessed widespread protests over Vietnam, women's rights, and civil rights, as well as the assassinations

of President John F. Kennedy, his brother, presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, and of civil rights leaders Medgar Evers,

Malcolm X, and Dr Martin Luther King Jr.

So there are a couple of major parallels in that the issues that I think were most

central to the 1960s, the ones that were the most divisive in the 1960s.

They have continued to be incredibly divisive issues up to the current day.

The most obvious of those is the question of race in America.

Foreign policy in the place of the United States in the world, which became a major issue again this spring with the college protest movement over Israeli policy in Gaza.

And then one of the themes that I think

we don't think about quite as much in the 1960s

is the really fundamental transformation

of the relationship between the government and private life and

particularly sexual life. One of the great markers of the end of the 1960s was Roe v. Way.

And of course that's an issue that has been incredibly divisive ever since and now of course

has become a major, major point of contention in American public life.

So there's huge continuity.

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