One Day

December 28, 1986. It was a Sunday--Ronald Reagan was president, Oliver Stone's Platoon was lighting up movie screens across the country, and readers were terrified by Stephen King's latest novel, It. It is also the date that Gene Weingarten, two-time Pulitzer Prize winner and Washington Post columnist, literally pulled out of a hat, selecting the month, day, and year at random. Compared to other dates seared in our collective memory, that was a quiet Sunday between Christmas and the New Year. But as Weingarten asks, Is there really such a thing as an ordinary day?

In One Day, what was a seemingly insignificant day in American history has been transformed into a riveting, poignant collection about the quiet dramas that were entered into the public record but escaped public memory. Through a combination of crowdsourced[KJ1] stories and years of research, Weingarten revisits the lives of December 28's stories, showing how an arbitrarily chosen twenty-four hours can act as a herald for the momentous events that would later make history. He finds that racial and economic disparity and the mistreatment of minority groups are deep veins, running through even the quietest days in American history. And he shows that small dramas and kindnesses in the unremarkable news items can illuminate the often surprising moments of human connection.