Radical Heritage


Book Description

Historian Carlos A. Schwantes studies the forces that shaped the history of the labor movement on either side of the forty-ninth parallel and the reason for the eventual demise of the socialist movement in Washington State and its continuing vigor in British Columbia.




Radical Republicanism


Book Description

This book aims to retrieve an inclusive understanding of republicanism drawing on a broad spectrum of historical and geographic contexts, one with the resources to analyse and challenge the sources of arbitrary power from capitalism, to imperialism, to patriarchy.




Eco-Fascists


Book Description

Forty million Americans have been driven from their lands and rural culture is being systematically crushed, even as wildlife, forests, and rangelands are dying. Journalist Elizabeth Nickson’s investigations into these events have revealed a shocking truth: rather than safeguarding our environment, radical conservationists are actually destroying our natural heritage. In Eco-Fascists, Nickson documents the destructive impact of the environmental movement in North America and beyond, detailing the extreme damage environmental radicals in local and national government agencies are doing to the land, the ecosystems, and the people. Readers of Alston Chase’s Playing God in Yellowstone and In a Dark Wood, and anyone who is deeply concerned about global warming and the environment must read Elizabeth Nickson’s Eco-Fascists.




The Young Lords


Book Description

Against the backdrop of America's escalating urban rebellions in the 1960s, an unexpected cohort of New York radicals unleashed a series of urban guerrilla actions against the city's racist policies and contempt for the poor. Their dramatic flair, uncompromising socialist vision for a new society, skillful ability to link local problems to international crises, and uncompromising vision for a new society riveted the media, alarmed New York's political class, and challenged nationwide perceptions of civil rights and black power protest. The group called itself the Young Lords. Utilizing oral histories, archival records, and an enormous cache of police surveillance files released only after a decade-long Freedom of Information Law request and subsequent court battle, Johanna Fernandez has written the definitive account of the Young Lords, from their roots as a Chicago street gang to their rise and fall as a political organization in New York. Led by poor and working-class Puerto Rican youth, and consciously fashioned after the Black Panther Party, the Young Lords occupied a hospital, blocked traffic with uncollected garbage, took over a church, tested children for lead poisoning, defended prisoners, fought the military police, and fed breakfast to poor children. Their imaginative, irreverent protests and media conscious tactics won reforms, popularized socialism in the United States and exposed U.S. mainland audiences to the country's quiet imperial project in Puerto Rico. Fernandez challenges what we think we know about the sixties. She shows that movement organizers were concerned with finding solutions to problems as pedestrian as garbage collection and the removal of lead paint from tenement walls; gentrification; lack of access to medical care; childcare for working mothers; and the warehousing of people who could not be employed in deindustrialized cities. The Young Lords' politics and preoccupations, especially those concerning the rise of permanent unemployment foretold the end of the American Dream. In riveting style, Fernandez demonstrates how the Young Lords redefined the character of protest, the color of politics, and the cadence of popular urban culture in the age of great dreams.




Heart Radical


Book Description

Wanting to understand how her path is tied to her mother tongue, Anne, a young, multiracial American woman, travels through China, the country of her mother’s birth. Along the way, she tries on different roles—seeker, teacher, student, girlfriend, artist, and daughter—and continually asks herself: Why do I feel called to make this journey? Whether witnessing a Tibetan sky burial, teaching English at a university in Chengdu, visiting her grandmother in LA, or falling in love with a Chinese painter, Anne is always in pursuit of intimacy with others, even as she is all too aware of her silences and separation. For two years, she settles into a comfortable routine in her boyfriend’s apartment and regains fluency in Chinese, a language she spoke as a young child but has used less and less as an adult. Eventually, however, her desire to know herself in other ways surfaces again. She misses speaking English, she feels suffocated by urban, polluted China, and she starts to fall for another man. Ultimately, Anne realizes that to live her truth as a mixed-race, bilingual woman she must embrace all of her influences and layers. In a world that often wants us to choose a side or fit an ideal, she learns that she can both belong and not belong wherever she is, and that home is ultimately found within.




Histories of a Radical Book


Book Description

For better or worse, E.P. Thompson’s monumental book The Making of the English Working Class has played an essential role in shaping the intellectual lives of generations of readers since its original publication in 1963. This collected volume explores the complex impact of Thompson’s book, both as an intellectual project and material object, relating it to the social and cultural history of the book form itself—an enduring artifact of English history.




The Portland Red Guide


Book Description

A historical guidebook of social dissent, Michael Munk's The Portland Red Guide describes local radicals, their organizations, and their activities in relation to physical sites in the Rose City. With the aid of maps and historical photos, Munk's stories are those that history books often exclude. The historical listings expand readers' perspectives of the unique city and its radical past. The Portland Red Guide is a testament to Portland's rich history of working-class people and organizations that stood against repression and injustice. It honors those who insisted on pursuing a better justification for their lives rather than the quest for material wealth, and who dedicated themselves to offering alternative visions of how to organize society. The Portland Red Guide uses maps to give readers a walking tour of the city as well as to illustrate sites such as the house where Woody Guthrie wrote his Columbia River songs; the office of the Red Squad (the only memorial to John Reed); the home of early feminist Dr. Marie Equi; and the downtown site of Portland's first Afro-American League protest in 1898. This new edition includes up-to-date information about Portland's most contemporary radicals and suggests routes to help readers walk in the shadows of dissidents, radicals, and revolutionaries. These stories challenge mainstream culture and testify that many in Portland were, and still are, motivated to improve the condition of the world rather than their personal status in it.




Democracy in Chains


Book Description

Winner of the Lillian Smith Book Award Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize Finalist for the National Book Award The Nation's "Most Valuable Book" “[A] vibrant intellectual history of the radical right.”—The Atlantic “This sixty-year campaign to make libertarianism mainstream and eventually take the government itself is at the heart of Democracy in Chains. . . . If you're worried about what all this means for America's future, you should be.”—NPR An explosive exposé of the right’s relentless campaign to eliminate unions, suppress voting, privatize public education, stop action on climate change, and alter the Constitution. Behind today’s headlines of billionaires taking over our government is a secretive political establishment with long, deep, and troubling roots. The capitalist radical right has been working not simply to change who rules, but to fundamentally alter the rules of democratic governance. But billionaires did not launch this movement; a white intellectual in the embattled Jim Crow South did. Democracy in Chains names its true architect—the Nobel Prize-winning political economist James McGill Buchanan—and dissects the operation he and his colleagues designed over six decades to alter every branch of government to disempower the majority. In a brilliant and engrossing narrative, Nancy MacLean shows how Buchanan forged his ideas about government in a last gasp attempt to preserve the white elite’s power in the wake of Brown v. Board of Education. In response to the widening of American democracy, he developed a brilliant, if diabolical, plan to undermine the ability of the majority to use its numbers to level the playing field between the rich and powerful and the rest of us. Corporate donors and their right-wing foundations were only too eager to support Buchanan’s work in teaching others how to divide America into “makers” and “takers.” And when a multibillionaire on a messianic mission to rewrite the social contract of the modern world, Charles Koch, discovered Buchanan, he created a vast, relentless, and multi-armed machine to carry out Buchanan’s strategy. Without Buchanan's ideas and Koch's money, the libertarian right would not have succeeded in its stealth takeover of the Republican Party as a delivery mechanism. Now, with Mike Pence as Vice President, the cause has a longtime loyalist in the White House, not to mention a phalanx of Republicans in the House, the Senate, a majority of state governments, and the courts, all carrying out the plan. That plan includes harsher laws to undermine unions, privatizing everything from schools to health care and Social Security, and keeping as many of us as possible from voting. Based on ten years of unique research, Democracy in Chains tells a chilling story of right-wing academics and big money run amok. This revelatory work of scholarship is also a call to arms to protect the achievements of twentieth-century American self-government.




Rebel Footprints


Book Description

A truly radical response to conservative heritage tours and banal day trips, Rebel Footprints brings to life the history of social movements in England’s capital. David Rosenberg transports readers from well-known landmarks to history-making hidden corners, while telling the story of protest and struggle in London from the early nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. From the suffragettes to the socialists, from the chartists to the trade unionists: Rosenberg invites us to step into the footprints of a diverse cast of dedicated fighters for social justice. Individual chapters highlight particular struggles and their participants, from famous faces to lesser-known luminaries. Rosenberg sets London’s radical campaigners against the backdrop of the city’s multi-faceted development. Self-directed walks pair with narratives that seamlessly blend history, politics, and geography, while specially commissioned maps and illustrations immerse the reader in the story of the city. Whether you’re visiting London for the first time, or born and raised there, Rosenberg invites you to see London as you never have before--the radical center of the English-speaking world.




The Radical Wesley


Book Description

John Wesley's model of the church. The book offers a guideline for Christians to work out their theology in day-to-day life. This analysis of Wesley's strategy for renewing the church offers inspiration to those working to bring about that renewal.