Over at History News Network, they are running an adapted excerpt from Morning in America: How Ronald Reagan Invented the 1980s by Gil Troy. The subject of the essay? Michael Jackson, of course!

It is not stretching to credit Michael Jackson as one of the trailblazers for Barack Obama, himself just three years younger than Jackson.

…

For those of us, like Obama, born toward the end of the baby boom in 1961, Michael Jackson was not just a phenomenon but our phenomenon.

Read the rest at HNN.