Join Lauren Collins for a conversation about her New York Times bestselling book They Stole a City, which traces the lives of four Wilmington, North Carolina, families—two Black, two white—across 125 years following the 1898 white supremacist massacre and the only successful coup d’état on American soil. Written in collaboration with living descendants of the families, the book combines archival research with personal testimony to uncover how one largely forgotten act of political violence reshaped a city, undermined democracy, and continues to reverberate across American life today.
This conversation will be moderated by author and professor, Jonathan Levy.
About the speakers:
Lauren Collins is a staff writer for The New Yorker. Her subjects have included Michelle Obama, Emmanuel Macron, Demna, the street artist Invader, French tacos, the refugee crisis, and equal pay. Since 2015 she has been based in Paris, covering stories mainly from France. She is the author of When in French: Love in a Second Language, which the Times named as one of its 100 Notable Books of 2016. They Stole a City: Wilmington’s White Supremacist Coup and the Families Who Live With Its Legacy was released in July 2026 is a New York Times bestseller.
Jonathan Levy is professeur des universités at Sciences Po, Paris and Visiting Professor in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. A historian of the United States, among other books he is the author of Ages of American Capitalism: A History of the United States.
