History Is Lunch: Beverly Gage, "G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and Mississippi"

On November 1, 2023, Beverly Gage present “G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and Mississippi” as part of the History Is Lunch series.
Gage’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book G-Man-J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century explores Hoover’s life and career from his birth in 1895 to a modest Washington civil-service family through his death in 1972. The biography draws from never-before-seen sources to create a portrait of a man who dominated half a century of U.S. history and planted the seeds for much of today’s conservative political landscape.
When Hoover became director of the FBI in 1924, he was the trim, dazzling wunderkind of the administrative state with big ideas for reform. Hoover transformed a failing law-enforcement backwater into a modern machine, and he believed in the power of the federal government to do great things for the nation and its citizens.
“But Hoover also believed that certain people-many of them communists or racial minorities or both-did not deserve to be included in that American project,” said Gage. “Hoover rose to power and then stayed there, decade after decade, using the tools of state to create a personal fiefdom unrivaled in U.S. history.”
Beverly Gage is professor of 20th-century U.S. history at Yale University. She earned her BA in American Studies from Yale University (magna cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa) and her PhD in history from Columbia University, where her dissertation won the Bancroft Award. At Yale, she received the Sarai Ribicoff Award for excellence in teaching. Gage’s book G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century received the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Biography, the Bancroft Prize in American History, the National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Biography and was named a best book of 2022 by the Washington Post, The Atlantic, Publishers Weekly, The New Yorker, The New York Times, and Smithsonian. Her previous book is The Day Wall Street Exploded: A Story of America in its First Age of Terror, and she is a regular contributor to The New Yorker, New York Times, and Washington Post.
History Is Lunch is sponsored by the John and Lucy Shackelford Charitable Fund of the Community Foundation for Mississippi. The weekly lecture series of the Mississippi Department of Archives and History explores different aspects of the state's past. The hour-long programs are held in the Craig H. Neilsen Auditorium of the Museum of Mississippi History and Mississippi Civil Rights Museum building at 222 North Street in Jackson and livestreamed on RUclips and Facebook.