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The Pulitzer Prize for history ideally recognizes a book that engages and educates both historians and a broader reading public. Marcia Chatelain's Franchise, the winner of the 2021 Pulitzer Prize for history, succeeds impressively in doing just that. Chatelain tells an unknown, compelling story of how the fast-food giant McDonald's became a battleground for civil rights that stretched over the entire postwar era, from the early 1960s into our own time. Through the prism of McDonald's franchise operation, readers watch the story unfold from customers' demand for equal access before and even after the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, through the struggle by Black entrepreneurs to convince McDonald's to award them franchises, to how the growing numbers of established franchisees fared with corporate headquarters and their local communities. Faced with far higher costs and pressures in neighborhoods that saw them as much-needed sources of employment and social...
Lizabeth Cohen (Thu,) studied this question.