Daniel Scroop, a historian of the United States based at the University of Glasgow in Scotland and currently a Fulbright Scholar in the U.S., charts the relationship between U.S. history and the public realm since the end of the Second World War. Based on new research in the vast correspondence of William E. Leuchtenburg (1922-2025), one of America's preeminent historians and for several decades its leading historian of the New Deal, he examines how one historian's choices about civil rights, Vietnam, and the turmoil on campuses in the 1960s and 1970s illuminate the character of American liberalism and its connection to the historical profession in the second half of the twentieth century.