Brandon Terry's Latest Book Named to New York Times 100 Notable Books of 2025

Congratulations to our faculty committee member Brandon Terry, whose book "Shattered Dreams, Infinite Hope: A Tragic Vision of the Civil Rights Movement" was named one of The New York Times' 100 Notable Books of 2025.

From Matt Delmont's NYT review: The book examines how competing histories of the civil rights movement have shaped Americans’ understanding of civic ideals, political commitments, moral principles and social policies.

Terry aims to guide readers through a disorienting landscape where the legacy of the civil rights movement is, at different times and for different political purposes, celebrated, attacked, ignored and undermined.

Finding both romanticism and pessimism inadequate as responses to our past and present, Terry endorses instead a vision of civil rights history drawn from King's emphasis on the tragic. Tragedy, in Terry's view, is "a way of seeing and feeling that does not deny hope, but refuses easy optimism."