On June 26, 2015, the United States Supreme Court ruled that state bans on gay marriage were unconstitutional, making same-sex unions legal across the United States. But the road to that momentous decision was much longer than many know. In this definitive work, Sasha Issenberg takes us back to Hawaii in the 1990s, when that state's courts first started grappling with the novel question, through the emergence of the Defense of Marriage Act in 1996 that raised marriage to a national issue, to the first legal same-sex weddings in Massachusetts, to the epic face-off over California's Proposition 8, and finally to the landmark Supreme Court decisions of Windsor and Obergefell.

The meticulously reported narrative follows the coast-to-coast conflict through courtrooms and war rooms, bedrooms and boardrooms, to shed light on every aspect of a political and legal controversy that divided Americans like no other issue. Following a cast of characters who sought their own right to wed, those who fought to protect the traditional definition of marriage, and those who changed their minds about it, The Engagement is sure to become a seminal book on the modern culture wars.