The Whole World is Watching: Mass Media in the Making and Unmaking of the New Left with a New Preface


Todd Gitlin - 1980
    In this classic book, originally published in 1980, acclaimed media critic Todd Gitlin first scrutinizes major news coverage in the early days of the antiwar movement. Drawing on his own experiences (he was president of the Students for a Democratic Society in 1963-64) and on interviews with key activists and news reporters, he shows in detail how the media first ignore new political developments, then select and emphasize aspects of the story that treat movements as oddities. He then demonstrates how the media glare made leaders into celebrities and estranged them from their movement base; how it inflated the importance of revolutionary rhetoric, destabilizing the movement, then promoted "moderate" alternatives--all the while spreading the antiwar message. Finally, Gitlin draws together a theory of news coverage as a form of anti-democratic social management--which he sees at work also in media treatment of the anti-nuclear and other later movements.Updated for 2003 with a new preface, The Whole World Is Watching is a subtle and sensitive book, true to the passions and ironic reversals of its subject, and filled with provocative insights that apply to the media's relationship with all activist movements.

Dream: Re-imagining Progressive Politics in an Age of Fantasy


Stephen Duncombe - 2007
    Although fantasy and spectacle have become the lingua franca of our time, Duncombe points out that liberals continue to depend upon sober reason to guide them and suggests ways in which they can adopt the new when producing policies.

Detroit: I Do Mind Dying: A Study in Urban Revolution


Dan Georgakas - 1975
    This new South End Press edition makes available the full text of this out-of-print classic--along with a new foreword by Manning Marable, interviews with participants in DRUM, and reflections on political developments over the past threee decades by Georgakas and Surkin.

Can't Knock the Hustle: Inside Brooklyn's Season of Hope: How Basketball Helped Us Survive Power, Politics, and a Global Pandemic


Matt Sullivan - 2021
    . . all of whom just so happened to play professional basketball. The 2019-20 Nets were the team of tomorrow—a player-first franchise, in a star-first city, at a nation-first moment—and anything was possible. As soon as the mega-stars Kevin Durant and Kyrie Irving arrived, the Nets were destined to become a dynasty for the ages.Then came the wildest year in modern NBA—and world—history.Can't Knock the Hustle is the definitive chronicle of the season when basketball's status as a force for progress in society was put to the ultimate test, and Matt Sullivan had a courtside seat: Deal-making with Kyrie and Jay-Z. Rehabbing with KD at the Nets' world-class health facility. International intrigue between LeBron James and the Chinese government. The final days of Kobe Bryant, front-row at Barclays Center in Brooklyn. The first days of Covid-19, when the Nets found themselves at the epicenter of a virus—and integral to a comeback of the very culture they had come to define.Hundreds of interviews—with NBA Hall-of-Famers, All-Stars, coaches, owners and power-brokers from across the globe—provide a lasting portrait of an unforgettable time, as sports brought people back together again, like never before.

Witness to the Revolution: Radicals, Resisters, Vets, Hippies, and the Year America Lost Its Mind and Found Its Soul


Clara Bingham - 2016
    From August 1969 to August 1970, the nation witnessed nine thousand protests and eighty-four acts of arson or bombings at schools across the country. It was the year of the My Lai massacre investigation, the Cambodia invasion, Woodstock, and the Moratorium to End the War. The American death toll in Vietnam was approaching fifty thousand, and the ascendant counterculture was challenging nearly every aspect of American society. Witness to the Revolution, Clara Bingham’s unique oral history of that tumultuous time, unveils anew that moment when America careened to the brink of a civil war at home, as it fought a long, futile war abroad.Woven together from one hundred original interviews, Witness to the Revolution provides a firsthand narrative of that period of upheaval in the words of those closest to the action—the activists, organizers, radicals, and resisters who manned the barricades of what Students for a Democratic Society leader Tom Hayden called “the Great Refusal.”We meet Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn of the Weather Underground; Daniel Ellsberg, the former Defense Department employee who released the Pentagon Papers; feminist theorist Robin Morgan; actor and activist Jane Fonda; and many others whose powerful personal stories capture the essence of an era. We witness how the killing of four students at Kent State turned a straitlaced social worker into a hippie, how the civil rights movement gave birth to the women’s movement, and how opposition to the war in Vietnam turned college students into prisoners, veterans into peace marchers, and intellectuals into bombers.With lessons that can be applied to our time, Witness to the Revolution is more than just a record of the death throes of the Age of Aquarius. Today, when America is once again enmeshed in racial turmoil, extended wars overseas, and distrust of the government, the insights contained in this book are more relevant than ever.

The Trouble With Rich Women (Singles Classic)


Gloria Steinem - 1986
    Intimacy and access make rebellion very dangerous.”In The Problem With Rich Women, Gloria Steinem explores how and why feminism failed to reach women in powerful families, and provides an urgent and persuasive argument for rebellion among upper-class women.The Problem With Rich Women was originally published in Ms., June 1986. Cover design by Adil Dara.

In America: Tales from Trump Country


Caitriona Perry - 2017
    In her first book, she goes beyond the news reports and delves into the American heartland where she witnessed the rise of Trump at first hand.

Hillbilly Nationalists, Urban Race Rebels, and Black Power: Community Organizing in Radical Times


Amy Sonnie - 2011
    Poor and working-class whites have tended to be painted as spectators, reactionaries, and, even, racists. Most Americans, the story goes, just watched the political movements of the sixties go by. James Tracy and Amy Sonnie, who have been interviewing activists from the era for nearly ten years, reject this old narrative. They show that poor and working-class radicals, inspired by the Civil Rights movement, the Black Panthers, and progressive populism, started to organize significant political struggles against racism and inequality during the 1960s and 1970s. Among these groups: +  JOIN Community Union brought together southern migrants, student radicals, and welfare recipients in Chicago to fight for housing, health, and welfare . . .  +  The Young Patriots Organization and Rising Up Angry organized self-identified hillbillies, Chicago greasers, Vietnam vets, and young feminists into a legendary “Rainbow Coalition” with Black and Puerto Rican activists . . .   +  In Philadelphia, the October 4th Organization united residents of industrial Kensington against big business, war, and a repressive police force . . .  + In the Bronx, White Lightning occupied hospitals and built coalitions with doctors to fight for the rights of drug addicts and the poor. Exploring an untold history of the New Left, the book shows how these groups helped to redefine community organizing—and transforms the way we think about a pivotal moment in U.S. history.

Poor People's Movements: Why They Succeed, How They Fail


Frances Fox Piven - 1977
    Have the poor fared best by participating in conventional electoral politics or by engaging in mass defiance and disruption? The authors of the classic Regulating The Poor assess the successes and failures of these two strategies as they examine, in this provocative study, four protest movements of lower-class groups in 20th century America:-- The mobilization of the unemployed during the Great Depression that gave rise to the Workers' Alliance of America-- The industrial strikes that resulted in the formation of the CIO-- The Southern Civil Rights Movement-- The movement of welfare recipients led by the National Welfare Rights Organization.

The Way the Wind Blew: A History of the Weather Underground


Ron Jacobs - 1997
    Mauled in street battles with the Chicago police during the Days of Rage demonstrations, Weather concluded that traditional political protest was insufficient to end the war. They turned instead to underground guerrilla combat.In this highly readable history, Ron Jacobs captures the hair-raising drama of a campaign which planted bombs in banks, military installations and, twice on successive days, in the US Capitol. He describes the group’s formation of clandestine revolutionary cells, its leaders’ disavowal of monogamous relationships, and their use of LSD to strengthen bonds between members. He recounts the operational failures of the group—three members died when a bomb they were building exploded in Greenwich Village—as well as its victories including a successful jailbreak of Timothy Leary. Never short-changing the fierce debates which underpinned the Weather’s strategy, Jacobs argues that the groups eventual demise resulted as much from the contradictions of its politics as from the increasingly repressive FBI attention.

Underground: My Life with SDS and the Weathermen


Mark Rudd - 2009
    The chairman of the SDS and leader of the 1968 student uprising at Columbia University, Rudd offers a gripping narrative of his political awakening and fugitive life during one of the most influential periods in modern U.S. history.

This Is an Uprising: How Nonviolent Revolt Is Shaping the Twenty-First Century


Mark Engler - 2016
    When mass movements erupt onto our television screens, the media consistently portrays them as being spontaneous and unpredictable. Yet, in this book, Mark and Paul Engler look at the hidden art behind such outbursts of protest, examining core principles that have been used to spark and guide moments of transformative unrest. With incisive insights from contemporary activists, as well as fresh revelations about the work of groundbreaking figures such as Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., Gene Sharp, and Frances Fox Piven, the Englers show how people with few resources and little conventional influence are engineering the upheavals that are reshaping contemporary politics. Nonviolence is usually seen simply as a philosophy or moral code. This Is an Uprising shows how it can instead be deployed as a method of political conflict, disruption, and escalation. It argues that if we are always taken by surprise by dramatic outbreaks of revolt, we pass up the chance to truly understand how social transformation happens.

Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision


Barbara Ransby - 2003
    A gifted grassroots organizer, Baker shunned the spotlight in favor of vital behind-the-scenes work that helped power the black freedom struggle. She was a national officer and key figure in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, one of the founders of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and a prime mover in the creation of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Baker made a place for herself in predominantly male political circles that included W. E. B. Du Bois, Thurgood Marshall, and Martin Luther King Jr., all the while maintaining relationships with a vibrant group of women, students, and activists both black and white.In this deeply researched biography, Barbara Ransby chronicles Baker's long and rich political career as an organizer, an intellectual, and a teacher, from her early experiences in depression-era Harlem to the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Ransby shows Baker to be a complex figure whose radical, democratic worldview, commitment to empowering the black poor, and emphasis on group-centered, grassroots leadership set her apart from most of her political contemporaries. Beyond documenting an extraordinary life, the book paints a vivid picture of the African American fight for justice and its intersections with other progressive struggles worldwide across the twentieth century.

Angry White Men: American Masculinity at the End of an Era


Michael S. Kimmel - 2013
    On election night, after Obama was announced the winner, a distressed Bill O’Reilly lamented that he didn’t live in "a traditional America anymore.” He was joined by others who bellowed their grief on the talk radio airwaves, the traditional redoubt of angry white men. Why were they so angry? Sociologist Michael Kimmel, one of the leading writers on men and masculinity in the world today, has spent hundreds of hours in the company of America’s angry white men from white supremacists to men's rights activists to young students in pursuit of an answer. Angry White Men presents a comprehensive diagnosis of their fears, anxieties, and rage.Kimmel locates this increase in anger in the seismic economic, social and political shifts that have so transformed the American landscape. Downward mobility, increased racial and gender equality, and a tenacious clinging to an anachronistic ideology of masculinity has left many men feeling betrayed and bewildered. Raised to expect unparalleled social and economic privilege, white men are suffering today from what Kimmel calls "aggrieved entitlement": a sense that those benefits that white men believed were their due have been snatched away from them.Angry White Men discusses, among others, the sons of small town America, scarred by underemployment and wage stagnation. When America’s white men feel they’ve lived their lives the 'right' way, worked hard and stayed out of trouble, and still do not get economic rewards, then they have to blame somebody else. Even more terrifying is the phenomenon of angry young boys. School shootings in the United States are not just the work of "misguided youth" or "troubled teens"—they’re all committed by boys. These alienated young men are transformed into mass murderers by a sense that using violence against others is their right.The future of America is more inclusive and diverse. The choice for angry white men is not whether or not they can stem the tide of history: they cannot. Their choice is whether or not they will be dragged kicking and screaming into that inevitable future, or whether they will walk openly and honorably—far happier and healthier, incidentally—alongside those they’ve spent so long trying to exclude.

Mothers of Massive Resistance: White Women and the Politics of White Supremacy


Elizabeth Gillespie McRae - 2018
    For decades in rural communities, in university towns, and in New South cities, white women performed myriad duties that upheld white over black: censoring textbooks, denying marriage certificates, deciding on the racial identity of their neighbors, celebrating school choice, canvassing communities for votes, and lobbying elected officials. They instilled beliefs in racial hierarchies in their children, built national networks, and experimented with a color-blind political discourse. Without these mundane, everyday acts, white supremacist politics could not have shaped local, regional, and national politics the way it did or lasted as long as it has.With white women at the center of the story, the rise of postwar conservatism looks very different than the male-dominated narratives of the resistance to Civil Rights. Women like Nell Battle Lewis, Florence Sillers Ogden, Mary Dawson Cain, and Cornelia Dabney Tucker publicized their threats to their Jim Crow world through political organizing, private correspondence, and journalism. Their efforts began before World War II and the Brown decision and persisted past the 1964 Civil Rights Act and anti-busing protests. White women's segregationist politics stretched across the nation, overlapping with and shaping the rise of the New Right. Mothers of Massive Resistance reveals the diverse ways white women sustained white supremacist politics and thought well beyond the federal legislation that overturned legal segregation.