Parting the Waters

The definitive narrative history of the civil rights years, the first volume of a trilogy that took its author twenty-four years to write. Branch treats the movement as American history of the first rank, told through the people who made it, day by day and decision by decision. It is long because the story is large and the detail is the point. To read it is to understand that the movement was not an event but a vast, sustained, human act of will.

The historian who spent twenty-four years writing the definitive narrative of the civil rights movement in three volumes, beginning with Parting the Waters. The trilogy treats the movement as American history of the first rank, told through the people who made it day by day, decision by decision. The work won the Pulitzer Prize and set the standard for how the era is now understood.