Insider

GovernerdsTM Insider

  • Six one-hour workshops with guest speakers
  • Private Instagram account where I post stories and answer questions
  • Regular deep dives on the private Instagram account
  • An exclusive book club reading of The Small and the Mighty with special guest moderators and James by Percival Everett. Book discussions and private author meetings with me and Percival Everett!
  • Regular lives and Zoom hangouts with me!
  • Exclusive merch designs for purchase!
Register now

Books this season

The Small and the Mighty Book Cover

The Small and the Mighty

By:Sharon McMahon

In The Small and the Mighty, Sharon McMahon proves that the most remarkable Americans are often ordinary people who didn’t make it into the textbooks. Not the presidents, but the telephone operators. Not the aristocrats, but the schoolteachers. Through meticulous research, she discovers history’s unsung characters and brings their rich, riveting stories to light for the first time.

You’ll meet a woman astride a white horse riding down Pennsylvania Ave, a young boy detained at a Japanese incarceration camp, a formerly enslaved woman on a mission to reunite with her daughter, a poet on a train, and a teacher who learns to work with her enemies. More than one thing is bombed, and multiple people surprisingly become rich. Some rich with money, and some wealthy with things that matter more.

This is a book about what really made America–and Americans–great. McMahon’s cast of improbable champions will become familiar friends, lighting the path we journey in our quest to make the world more just, peaceful, good, and free.

Jame: A Novel Book Cover

James: A Novel

By:Percival Everett

When the enslaved Jim overhears that he is about to be sold to a man in New Orleans, separated from his wife and daughter forever, he decides to hide on nearby Jackson Island until he can formulate a plan. Meanwhile, Huck Finn has faked his own death to escape his violent father, recently returned to town. As all readers of American literature know, thus begins the dangerous and transcendent journey by raft down the Mississippi River toward the elusive and too-often-unreliable promise of the Free States and beyond.

While many narrative set pieces of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn remain in place (floods and storms, stumbling across both unexpected death and unexpected treasure in the myriad stopping points along the river’s banks, encountering the scam artists posing as the Duke and Dauphin…), Jim’s agency, intelligence and compassion are shown in a radically new light.

Meet the authors

Sharon McMahon

with guest discussion leaders

After years of serving as a high school government and law teacher, Sharon McMahon took her passion for education to Instagram, where more than a million people (whoaffectionately call themselves “Governerds”) rely on her for non-partisan, fact-based information as “America's Government Teacher.” In a time where flashy headlines and false information often take the spotlight, Sharon is a reliable source for truth and logic.

Sharon is also the host of the award-winning podcast, Here’s Where It Gets Interesting, where, each week, she provides entertaining yet factual accounts of America’s most fascinating moments and people. In all that she does, Sharon encourages others to be world-changing humans. She has led her community in various philanthropic initiatives that have raised more than $9 million for teachers, domestic violence survivors, terminally ill children, medical debt forgiveness programs, refugees, and more.

In addition, she is the author of The Preamble, a Substack newsletter about politics and history.

Percival Everett

Percival Everett is the author of over thirty books, including So Much Blue, Telephone, Dr No and The Trees, which was shortlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize and won the 2022 Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize. He has received the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award and the PEN Center USA Award for Fiction, has been a Pulitzer Prize finalist, and is Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern California. His novel Erasure has now been adapted into the major film American Fiction. He lives in Los Angeles.

This season's guest speakers

Join us for an hour to learn about fascinating topics!

Steve Vladeck

Steve Vladeck

author of The Shadow Docket

Georgetown law professor and Supreme Court scholar gives us a preview of the biggest cases before the Court this term

Rebecca Nagle

Rebecca Nagle

author of By the Fire We Carry

Expert on Native American law talks about the generations-long fight for justice on native land

Eric Holder

Eric Holder

author of Our Unfinished March

Former US Attorney General and voting rights warrior discusses the ongoing struggle for equal access to the ballot

Jonathan Haidt

Jonathan Haidt

author of The Anxious Generation

Acclaimed professor and researcher talks about children and social media, and what it means for all of us

Jennifer Ackerman

Jennifer Ackerman

author of What an Owl Knows

Acclaimed science author surrounds us with the latest on everything we know about one of nature’s most enigmatic animals: the owl

Jermaine Fowler

Jermaine Fowler

author of The Humanity Archive

Public historian presents a companion workshop to the book James exploring what happens when we shift the narrative on history we think we know

Governerds Insider

The details

  • Six one-hour workshops with guest speakers
  • Private Instagram account where I post stories and answer questions
  • Regular deep dives on the private Instagram account
  • An exclusive book club reading of The Small and the Mighty with special guest moderators and James by Percival Everett. Book discussions and private author meetings with me and Percival Everett!
  • Regular lives and Zoom hangouts with me!
  • Exclusive merch designs for purchase!
2024

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