Paradoxically, the country that pioneered the expansion of civil liberties allowed corporations to assemble private armies to disrupt union organizing, spy on workers, and break strikes. Using a social-historical approach, Stephen Norwood focuses on the mercenaries the corporations enlisted in their anti-union efforts--particularly college students, African American men, the unemployed, and men associated with organized crime. Norwood also considers the paramilitary methods unions developed to counter mercenary violence. The book covers a wide range of industries across much of the country. Norwood explores how the early twentieth-century crisis of masculinity shaped strikebreaking's appeal to elite youth and the media's romanticization of the strikebreaker as a new soldier of fortune. He examines how mining communities' perception of mercenaries as agents of a ribald, sexually unrestrained, new urban culture intensified labor conflict. The book traces the ways in which economic restructuring, as well as shifting attitudes toward masculinity and anger, transformed corporate anti-unionism from World War II to the present.

    Yet until now there has been no systematic attempt to chart the histories of these movements alongside one another. From early attempts to decriminalize gay sex to the movement against globalization, this book gives fresh insights into a neglected side of British history.

    Drawing from the experiences of many movement veterans, this collection of scholarly articles and personal memoirs illuminates in fresh ways one of the most important events in the recent history of American higher education. The contributors—whose perspectives range from that of FSM leader Mario Savio to University of California president Clark Kerr—-shed new light on such issues as the origins of the FSM in the civil rights movement, the political tensions within the FSM, the day-to-day dynamics of the protest movement, the role of the Berkeley faculty and its various factions, the 1965 trial of the arrested students, and the virtually unknown "little Free Speech Movement of 1966."