It feels like Renegade Girls just came out (and basically, it did!), but for my adult readers it’s time to reveal the cover for my next oral history book, 24 Hours at the Capitol: An Oral History of the January 6th Insurrection. The book comes out on December 30, 2025, just ahead of the fifth anniversary of the January 6 insurrection in early 2026 (can you believe it?).
This book is the natural sequel to 24 Hours in Charlottesville. Some of the same people were rioters in both events! In a larger ideological sense, there is a straight line from Cville to Jan 6 in terms of the rise of militarized fascists and white supremacists in this country. And we’ve seen that trend of increasing authoritarianism march right on through these recent months since I’ve finished writing this book and sent it to the printers, with ICE raids around the country and policies that cause pain to seemingly every marginalized group.
One question I’ve been thinking a lot about as I prepare to launch this book is this: why care about the history of January 6, 2021 when we’re facing a world of pain right now?
What I’ve settled on is that it’s imperative to tell the story– truthfully– of how we got here, to this second Trump administration. As any scholar of fascism and authoritarianism will tell you, history informs the future.
One of my interviewees, an anonymous photojournalist who was right in the mob on Jan 6, put it best, “I think that people forget that January 6th is our floor now. This is where we’re standing at. It’s not this thing that happened that’s just random. No. That is where our reality has moved to. It is our baseline for behavior that now has happened. It’s like it’s out of the bag, so that’s why I think it’s important to be truthful about it.”
That’s my goal for this project– to tell that truth– and I think oral history and the plurality of voices it includes is the best method possible.
So without further ado… here is the official cover of my next book, 24 Hours at the Capitol: An Oral History of the January 6th Insurrection, which is available for pre-order now!
