Join us to hear the dramatic untold story of Barry Goldwater’s and Martin Luther King Jr.’s decade-long clash over the meaning of freedom—and how their conflicting visions still divide American politics.

In the mid-1950s, Barry Goldwater and Martin Luther King Jr. emerged as the leaders of two diametrically opposed freedom movements that changed the course of American history. King mobilized civil rights activists under the banner of “freedom now,” insisting that true freedom would not be realized until all people—regardless of race—were empowered politically, economically and socially. Goldwater rallied conservatives to the cause of “extremism in defense of liberty,” advocating radical individualism. Nicholas Buccola tells the compelling story of Goldwater’s and King’s dramatic debate over the meaning of an all-important American ideal.

Part dual biography, part history, One Man’s Freedom traces the actions and words of Goldwater and King over a crucial and eventful decade, from their dizzying rise through 1964, which ended with Goldwater’s landslide defeat in the presidential election and King’s Nobel Peace Prize. Buccola chronicles why Goldwater and King, who never met in person, came to view each other as perhaps the greatest threat to freedom in America. He says their ideas of freedom could be so vastly different, yet both so deeply rooted in American history and their times. And he argues that their disagreement continues to shape and explain politics today, when the bitter divisions between Republicans and Democrats often come down to the question of what kind of freedom Americans want—the one defined by Goldwater or the one defined by King?