Thanks for
Joining uS!
Join or Die is all about coming together in real life — so the best way to watch the film remains, appropriately…together! — and we would love to have you host a screening of your own with your community.
Send me info about How to Host a Screening of my own:
Click play to watch the trailer above.
45 % Decline
...from the 1970s to the 1990s in the number of times Americans entertained friends at home.
40% Decline
...from 1973 to 1994 in the number of Americans who say they attended even one public meeting on town or school affairs in the previous year.
50% Decline
...from 1973 to 1994 in the number of Americans who took any leadership role in any local organization.
About the film
The film charts Putnam's work as he attempts to solve a civic mystery: what makes democracy work — and why is American democracy in crisis?
In the 1980s, Robert Putnam was an obscure academic when he happened upon shocking social science data out of Italy that would propel him on a three-decade quest to investigate a hunch he had about his own country’s civic decline. It would lead the tireless Midwestern detective on a winding tour through the major social trends of the past 50 years, from community engagement in the 1990s, to the culture wars of the 2000s, and to economic inequality in the 2010s.
Along the way, the unassuming, quirky professor would rocket to national fame. His best-selling book Bowling Alone, which argued that Americans were becoming increasingly isolated from one another, would be a watershed in the history of popular social science, spurring debate in newspaper op-eds and on popular talk shows.
He would become the favorite social scientist of three Presidents and the first “adult” invited onto Facebook, earning him the monikers “the poet laureate of civil society” and America’s “Old Testament prophet with charts.”
In the film, we will join Putnam in the final years of his quest. We follow the veteran sleuth as he looks back at all the evidence he has gathered over his career and presents his full theory of the case to the American people. But as we do, we flash back to bring the audience along on Putnam's decades-long social science detective story about the nation's most important whodunit: What unraveled America?
