Radicals in America

Over the past decade, scholars have begun recovering the history of post-1960s radicalism in the United States, turning out organization-focused monographs and decade-specific collections. Howard Brick and Christopher Phelps's superb Radicals in America raises this emerging field to the next level by synthesizing work on the late twentieth century and placing it along the long continuum of left-wing politics. The book is admirable for its engaging structure, its inclusive and evenhanded coverage, and the novel insights it offers on the Left's potential to shape society. Each chapter begins with a biographical vignette of an individual whose activism personifies key themes of the period under review, then zooms out to succinctly describe the animating ideas and strategies of organizations. This method personalizes the narrative enough to make the book accessible to undergraduates while rewarding specialists with breadth. The second chapter masterfully integrates the distinct strands of communist historiography that have developed since 1989: one celebrating the antiracist initiatives of Communist party rank-and-filers, the other detailing the leadership's fealty to Soviet officials and connections to espionage. Yet, the contributions of smaller tendencies, such as the Catholic Worker and the coterie grouped around C. L. R. James, also get their due. The authors' persistence in tracking the development of U.S. anarchism across the second half of the twentieth century helps them explain, better than other historians, the ideology's influence on recent upsurges such as Occupy Wall Street

Art · Communism · Historiography · Ideology · Literature · Narrative · Political radicalism · Political science · Politics · Anarchism and Radical Politics · Communism, Protests, Social Movements · History · Italian Fascism and Post-war Society · Law

• A Transnational Protest against the National Security State

  Open Access•Kaeten Mistry•Journal of American History•2019

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