"Just as SNCC's courage and commitment shaped the civil rights movement in the 1960s, so this critical reflection by SNCC activists deepens our understanding of what happened then, and what it means today. A Circle of Trust is essential reading for all interested in struggles for a more inclusive democracy." Patricia Sullivan, Harvard University "The reminiscences and reflections voiced at the SNCC reunion remind us of the remarkable vision and courageous dedication of the civil rights movement of the 1960s. Framed by Cheryl Greenberg's eloquent and probing introduction, the SNCC veterans' comments about the triumphs and limitations of their movement represent a major contribution to the historical literature on race and power in modern America." --Raymond Arsenault, University of South Florida On the occasion of SNCC's twenty-fifth anniversary, more than five hundred people gathered at Trinity College in Connecticut to both celebrate and critique its accomplishments. In A Circle of Trust, forty SNCC members tell their stories and reflect on the contributions, limits, and legacies of the movement. Engaging in spirited debates with each other, with historians of the movement, and with contemporary political culture more broadly, these former and perpetual activists speak of their vision of a just society and what still remains to be done. Given racial tensions and the resurgence of the debate over integration and separatism in America in the 1990s, the content of this conference is more relevant than ever. Cheryl Greeenberg begins with an overview of SNCC and introduces each of the chapters of oral history. Participants explore the origins of SNCC, its early adoption of nonviolent protest, its ultimate renuciation of liberal integration and embrace of militant black radicalism, its refusal to repudiate far-left organizations, and controversies over the roles of women in SNCC and society at large. The result is a thoughtful, moving, if sometimes acrimonious account of one of the nation's most significant civil rights organizations and its successes and failures. Cheryl Lynn Greenberg is associate professor of history at Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut, and author of "Or Does It Explode?" Black Harlem in the Great Depression.

Cleary examines the origins, spread, and results of human rights movements in Latin America, and he analyzes the mark such movements have made in world politics. He shows the enormous difficulties encountered by fledgling grassroots groups which first challenged military dictatorships over the disappeared, detention, torture, and pervasive repression. He chronicles the amazingly dynamic growth of human rights organizations, affecting democratic processes in Latin America and foreign policy in the United States.

This book is particularly important because it establishes, for the first time, a record of why, how, where, and when the concept of human rights--not long ago absent as a practical concept--generates so powerful a Latin American response. The alliances so formed are shown to evoke continued popular support and to effect on-going fundamental changes in Latin America. An important survey to all scholars, researchers, and students of human rights and political affairs in Latin America.

The Montgomery bus boycott was a formative moment in twentieth-century history: a harbinger of the African American freedom movement, a springboard for the leadership of Martin Luther King Jr., and a crucial step in the struggle to realize the American dream of liberty and equality for all. In Daybreak of Freedom , Stewart Burns presents a groundbreaking documentary history of the boycott. Using an extraordinary array of more than one hundred original documents, he crafts a compelling and comprehensive account of this celebrated year-long protest of racial segregation. Daybreak of Freedom reverberates with the voices of those closest to the bus boycott, ranging from King and his inner circle, to Jo Ann Robinson and other women leaders who started the protest, to the maids, cooks, and other 'foot soldiers' who carried out the struggle. With a deft narrative hand and editorial touch, Burns weaves their testimony into a riveting story that shows how events in Montgomery pushed the entire nation to keep faith with its stated principles. |Burns presents a groundbreaking documentary history of the Montgomery bus boycott. The book reverberates with the voices of those closest to the protest, ranging from Martin Luther King Jr. and his inner circle, to Jo Ann Robinson and other women leaders who started the protest, to the maids, cooks, and other ""foot soldiers"" who carried out the struggle. With a deft narrative hand and editorial touch, Burns weaves their testimony into a riveting story that shows how events in Montgomery pushed the entire nation to keep faith with its stated principles.

Peasants in India hugging trees to protest logging, Brazilian feminists marching to impeach a president, Okinawan television comedians joke-starting ethnic activity: all are instances of social protest that exist in the charged territory between the cataclysmic upheaval of revolutionary wars and everyday acts of private resistance. Yet these movements "in between" resistance and revolution have remained invisible to scholars of politics, culture, and society. In this volume, leading scholars in anthropology, political science, history, sociology, and ethnomusicology examine dissent and direct action in Australia, Brazil, Germany, Columbia, India, Korea, Peru, and the United States and demonstrate the importance of looking beyond these poles of protest to the midways of mobilization. The contributors are Nancy Abelmann, Sonia E. Alvarez, Arturo Escobar, Richard G. Fox, Faye Ginsburg, Ramachandra Guha, Ingrid Monson, Yoshinobu Ota, Orin Starn, and Nathan Stoltzfus. Richard G. Fox is a professor of anthropology at Washington University in St. Louis and author of Gandhian Utopia: Experiments with Culture. Orin Starn is an assistant professor of cultural anthropology at Duke University and editor of The Peru Reader: History, Culture, and Politics.

The War of Gods traces the intimate relationship between religion, politics and social issues in Latin America over the last three decades, as liberation theology has reinterpreted the vocation of the Catholic Church and as Protestantism has made inroads on traditional Catholic strongholds. In the 1960s liberation theology addressed itself to the problems of a continent racked by poverty and oppression. Comprising a network of localized communities and pastoral organizations, it soon became something much more than a doctrinal current. Liberationist Christianity defined itself in a multitude of social struggles, particularly in Brazil and Central America. Many of the most momentous events in the continent's recent history - the Nicaraguan revolution, the development of the PT (Workers' Party) in Brazil, the tortuous ascent of President Aristide in Haiti and the uprising in Chiapas - have borne witness to the influence of a distinctive liberationist Christianity. Michael Lowy proposes here a new interpretation - inspired by the sociology of culture - both of liberation theology and of the rival religious projects in Latin America.

When contrasted with the miners' dramatic strike victories in 1972 and 1974, the shattering industrial defeat suffered by British miners in 1985 has been seen as evidence of the further weakening of working-class solidarity. Undertaken with complete unity, the strikes of 1972 and 1974 brought the miners substantial material gains, contributed to the downfall of a government, and reinforced the National Union of Mineworkers' position at the core of the British labour movement. In contrast, the strike in Britain in 1984/85 was marked by internal division and by the miners' attempt to resist the pit closure programme of the Thatcher government, and it ended in bitter defeat.

"Thoughtful, well written, and thoroughly researched, it is a work of disciplined, committed scholarship that is likely to inspire imitation....It represents the sort of scholarly advocacy that honors the historian's calling."--The New Republic

Reissued in new paperback format and design

"In hard, tight, and exact language, disciplined by close reasoning and close documentation, and seasoned with a sharp sense of character and drama, Hiller B. Zobel has written a definitive account. . . . Full of gripping detail, a good deal of myth-shattering, and some discriminating reappraisals." -Arthur B. Tourtellot, author of Lexington and Concord, in the New York Times Book Review

"Make[s] eighteenth-century courtroom scenes crackle with excitement."-Yale Review

This work examines how the civil rights movement crystallised views of citizenship as a grassroots-level, collective endeavour and of self-respect as a formidable political tool. Drawing on both oral and written sources, the book shows how rank-and-file movement particiants defined and discussed such concepts as rights, equality, justice and, in particular, freedom, and how such key movement leaders as Martin Luther King Jr, Ella Baker, Stokely Carmichael and James Forman were attuned to this ""freedom talk"". The book includes chapters on the concept of freedom in its many varieties, both individual and collective; on self-interest and self-respect; on Martin Luther King's use of the idea of freedom; and on the intellectual evolution of the Student Non-violent Co-ordinating committee, especially in light of Frantz Fanon's thought among movement radicals. In demonstrating that self-respect, self-determination, and solidarity were as central to the goals of the movement as the dismantling of the Jim Crow system, King argues that the movement's success should not be measured in terms of tangible, quantifiable advances alone, such as voter registration increases or improved standards of living. Not only has the civil rights movement helped strengthen the meaning and political importance of active citizenship in the cotemporary world, says King, but what was a political goal became the impetus for the academic and intellectual rediscovery of the Afro-American cultural and historical experience.

Occupying the Stage: the Theater of May '68 tells the story of student and worker uprisings in France through the lens of theater history, and the story of French theater through the lens of May '68. Based on detailed archival research and original translations, close readings of plays and historical documents, and a rigorous assessment of avant-garde theater history and theory, Occupying the Stage proposes that the French theater of 1959-71 forms a standalone paradigm called ""The Theater of May '68."" The book shows how French theater artists during this period used a strategy of occupation-occupying buildings, streets, language, words, traditions, and artistic processes-as their central tactic of protest and transformation. It further proposes that the Theater of May '68 has left imprints on contemporary artists and activists, and that this theater offers a scaffolding on which to build a meaningful analysis of contemporary protest and performance in France, North America, and beyond. At the book's heart is an inquiry into how artists of the period used theater as a way to engage in political work and, concurrently, questioned and overhauled traditional theater practices so their art would better reflect the way they wanted the world to be. Occupying the Stage embraces the utopic vision of May '68 while probing the period's many contradictions. It thus affirms the vital role theater can play in the ongoing work of social change.

Cross-border solidarity has captured the interest and imagination of scholars, activists and a range of political actors in such contested areas as the US-Mexico border and Guantanamo Bay. Chandra Russo examines how justice-seeking solidarity drives activist communities contesting US torture, militarism and immigration policies. Through compelling and fresh ethnographic accounts, Russo follows these activists as they engage in unusual and high risk forms of activism (fasting, pilgrimage, civil disobedience). She explores their ideas of solidarity and witnessing, which are central to how the activists explain their activities. This book adds to our understanding of solidarity activism under new global arrangements, and illuminates the features of movement activity that deepen activists' commitment by helping their lives feel more humane, just and meaningful. Based on participant observation, interviews, surveys and hundreds of courtroom statements, Russo develops a new theorization of solidarity that will take a central place in social movement studies.

How do some national-secessionist campaigns get on the global agenda whereas others do not? Which projects for new nation-states, Philip Roeder asks, give rise to mayhem in the politics of existing states? National secession has been explained by reference to identities, grievances, greed, and opportunities. With the strategic constraints most national-secession campaigns face, the author argues, the essential element is the campaign's ability to coordinate expectations within a population on a common goal-so that independence looks like the only viable option. Roeder shows how in most well-known national-secession campaigns, this strategy of programmatic coordination has led breakaway leaders to assume the critical task of propagating an authentic and realistic nation-state project. Such campaigns are most likely to draw attention in the capitals of the great powers that control admission to the international community, to bring the campaigns' disputes with their central governments to deadlock, and to engage in protracted, intense struggles to convince the international community that independence is the only viable option. In National Secession, Roeder focuses on the goals of national-secession campaigns as a key determinant of strategy, operational objectives, and tactics. He shifts the focus in the study of secessionist civil wars from tactics (such as violence) to the larger substantive disputes within which these tactics are chosen, and he analyzes the consequences of programmatic coordination for getting on the global agenda. All of which, he argues, can give rise to intractable disputes and violent conflicts.

This book tells the story of Ivory Perry, a black worker and community activist who, for more than thirty years, has distributed the leaflets, carried the picket signs, and planned and participated in the confrontations that were essential to the success of protest movements. Using oral histories and extensive archival research, George Lipsitz examines the culture of opposition through the events of Perry's life of commitment and illumines the social and political changes and conflicts that have convulsed the United States during the past fifty years.

October 21, 1967, Washington, D.C. 20,000 to 200,000 protesters are marching to end the war in Vietnam, while helicopters hover overhead and federal marshals and soldiers with fixed bayonets await them on the Pentagon steps. Among the marchers is Norman Mailer. From his own singular participation in the day's events and his even more extraordinary perceptions comes a classic work that shatters the mould of traditional reportage. Intellectuals and hippies, clergymen and cops, poets and army MPs crowd the pages of a book in which facts are fused with techniques of fiction to create the nerve-end reality of experiential truth. The Armies of the Night uniquely and unforgettably captures the Sixties' tidal wave of love and rage at its crest and a towering genius at his peak.

In this book, Michael A. Gordon examines the causes and consequences of the tragic and bloody "Orange Riots" that rocked New York City in 1870 and 1871. On July 12 of both years, groups of Irish Catholics clashed with Irish Protestants marching to commemorate the victory of 1690 at the Battle of the Boyne that confirmed the Protestant Ascendancy in Ireland. The violence of 1870 left eight people dead; the following year, more than sixty died.

Reconstructing the events of July 12 in those years, Gordon provides a riveting and richly detailed account of the riots. He maintains that they stemmed from more than religious hatred or generations of oppression in Ireland. Rather, both years bear witness to a struggle between two profoundly different visions of the promise of America: a re-creation of European social classes or a form of life liberated from the constraints and stratifications of the Old World. These visions were enmeshed n the turbulent ideological and political confrontations arising from industrialization and newly found immigrant power under New York City's notorious mayor, William Marcy "Boss" Tweed. Gordon concludes by showing how the riots sparked a reform movement that toppled Tweed from power and led to the restructuring of city politics in the 1870s.

"A lively survey of today's China as seen by [its] brooding intellectuals. A terrific book." —Nicholas D. Kristof, New York Times Book Review

Chinese intellectuals have a traditional duty, for which there is no equivalent in the West: to worry, to "take responsibility for all under heaven," to argue the question "What can we do with China?" In this "utterly absorbing gem of a book" (Library Journal), Perry Link conveys the worries besetting China's most prominent writers, journalists, scientists, professors, and dissident officials. Link creates "an invaluable opening onto China's best and brightest hearts and minds" (Kirkus Reviews), allowing the Chinese themselves to tell us why Beijing took to the streets in Sprig 1989.

This work provides a selection of underground documents (never before translated) of the two leading bodies of the Intifada: the United National Command and the Islamic Resistance Movement, known as Hamas. Communiques or leaflets were an essential element of Palestinian political life and served as a vehicle of expression and a way to direct behaviour and organise the people. Shaul Mishal carefully analyses these documents in an effort to understand the forces that turned the wheels of the Palestinian uprising: their goals; methods of operation; and their success in obtaining the willing cooperation of all segments of the Palestinian population. Since the Israeli conquest of the West Bank and Gaza in 1967, there had been minor eruptions of violence by Palestinians against Israelis. But for the 20 years before December 1987 and the uprising, there had never been such an intense and prolonged demonstration against the occupation. The Intifada inspired a new generation of Palestinian radicals who conducted their protests through petrol bombs and street violence and relayed their messages through underground propaganda. In place of any official and prominent leadership, communiques became the voice of the rebels. The book should be of interest to scholars and students of Middle East studies, particularly of the Arab-Israeli conflict.

In this study of Mahatma Gandhi, psychoanalyst Erik H. Erikson explores how Gandhi succeeded in mobilizing the Indian people both spiritually and politically as he became the revolutionary innovator of militant non-violence and India became the motherland of large-scale civil disobedience.

The year 1968 was ablaze with passion and mayhem as protests erupted in Paris and Prague, throughout the United States, and in cities on all continents. The Summer Olympic Games in Mexico were to be a moment of respite from chaos. But the image of peace - a white dove - adopted by organizers was an illusion, as was obvious to a record six hundred million people watching worldwide on satellite television. Ten days before the opening ceremony, soldiers slaughtered hundreds of student protesters in the capital. In Games of Discontent Harry Blutstein presents vivid accounts of threatened boycotts to protest racism in the United States, South Africa, and Rhodesia. He describes demonstrations by Czechoslovak gold medal gymnast Vera Caslavska against the Soviet-led invasion of her country. The most dramatic moment of the Olympic Games was Tommie Smith and John Carlos's black power salute from the podium. Blutstein furnishes new details behind their protest and examines how this iconic image seared itself into historical memory, inspiring Colin Kaepernick and a new generation of athlete-activists to take a knee against racism decades later. The 1968 Summer Games became a microcosm of the discord happening around the globe. Describing a range of protest activities preceding and surrounding the 1968 Olympics, Games of Discontent shines light on the world during a politically transformative moment when discontents were able, for the first time, to globalize their protests.

Social protest movements such as the civil rights movement and the gay rights movement mobilize and sustain themselves in ways that have long been of interest to social scientists. In this book some of the most distinguished scholars in the area of collective action present new theories about this process, fashioning a rich and conceptually sophisticated social psychology of social movements that goes beyond theories currently in use. The book includes sometimes competing, sometimes complementary paradigms by theorists in resource mobilization, conflict, feminism, and collective action and by social psychologists and comparativists. These authors view the social movement actor from a more sociological perspective than do adherents of rational choice theory, and they analyze ways in which structural and cultural determinants influence the actor and generate or inhibit collective action and social change. The authors state that the collective identities and political consciousness of social movement actors are significantly shaped by their race, ethnicity, class, gender, or religion. Social structure--with its disparities in resources and opportunities--helps determine the nature of grievances, resources, and levels of organization. The book not only distinguishes the mobilization processes of consensus movements from those of conflict movements but also helps to explain the linkages between social movements, the state, and societal changes.

For five days in July 1863, at the height of the Civil War, New York City was under siege. Angry rioters burned draft offices, closed factories, destroyed railroad tracks and telegraph lines, and hunted policemen and soldiers. Before long, the rioters turned their murderous wrath against the black community. In the end, at least 105 people were killed, making the draft riots the most violent insurrection in American history.

In this vividly written book, Iver Bernstein tells the compelling story of the New York City draft riots. He details how what began as a demonstration against the first federal draft soon expanded into a sweeping assault against the local institutions and personnel of Abraham Lincoln's Republican Party as well as a grotesque race riot. Bernstein identifies participants, dynamics, causes and consequences, and demonstrates that the "winners" and "losers" of the July 1863 crisis were anything but clear, even after five regiments rushed north from Gettysburg restored order. In a tour de force of historical detection, Bernstein shows that to evaluate the significance of the riots we must enter the minds and experiences of a cast of characters--Irish and German immigrant workers, Wall Street businessmen who frantically debated whether to declare martial law, nervous politicians in Washington and at City Hall. Along the way, he offers new perspectives on a wide range of topics: Civil War society and politics, patterns of race, ethnic and class relations, the rise of organized labor, styles of leadership, philanthropy and reform, strains of individualism, and the rise of machine politics in Boss Tweed's Tammany regime.

An in-depth study of one of the most troubling and least understood crises in American history, The New York City Draft Riots is the first book to reveal the broader political and historical context--the complex of social, cultural and political relations--that made the bloody events of July 1863 possible.

Loosely based on the Haitian slave insurrection of 1791, Babouk is a biting account of colonialism at its peak. By using the imagination of the novelist to fill in the gaps in the historical record, Endore is able to show us how slavery felt to the slaves who experienced it. His novel is rare for its depiction of the shared history of the slaves and its attention to the variety of the slave experience. It provides the reader with a vivid history of Haiti and a compelling account of slavery and rebellion.

It is widely argued that Britain has always followed a coherent imperialist strategy in Northern Ireland. Paul Bew and Henry Patterson take issue with this assumption in the first serious study of British policy towards Ulster over the past twenty years. They demonstrate, through a detailed examination of the twists and turns of successive governments, the fundamental incoherence of Britain's approach in its oldest colony.
Simplified notions about the consistency of British policy have led to undue pessimism amongst those advocating progressive change in the North. As a consequence they have missed real opportunities to achieve significant political realignment by exploiting the contradictions in Britain's stance.
Rejecting both the nationalist stance which defines the crisis in terms of an occupying army and the traditional bi-partisan approach which sees it only as a problem of terrorism, "The British State and the Ulster Crisis" is a brave and original contribution to a vital contemporary debate.

At first a voice in the wilderness, then the rallying cry of a new morality, abolitionism became the springboard to power of a major national party. Ballots for Freedom recapitulates the political war against slavery, from the first debates over the creation of an abolitionist third party to the election of Abraham Lincoln on an essentially antislavery Republican platform.