Populism has become one of the most overused terms in political discourse today. It can embrace authoritarian and nativist right-wing politicians but also those on the left who appeal for popular support for transformation. In its dominant usage it is seen as inimical to the values of liberal democracy. Yet others see it as part of the construction of a people-centred project that can realize true democracy. What is clear is that much of the debate around populism has been from the perspective of the global North and the voice of the South has been largely missing. This volume addresses this absence and provides a Latin American perspective to the global study of populism. It argues that Latin America in its rich and early experience of populism is a valuable laboratory to further our understanding and to address the question of whether populism now goes beyond the dichotomy of left and right and is a new political phenomenon. The book presents a series of case studies with cross-cutting overview chapters that highlight the lessons to be learned from new research. Each chapter is set within a tight conceptual framework in order to better understand contemporary Latin American politics “after the pink tide” and to enrich the international debate on populism from a Latin American perspective.

This memoir, compiled from the journals of Hannah Kilham, traces the life of this remarkable woman (1774-1832). It was prepared for publication in 1837 by her stepdaughter, Sarah Biller, who emphasises those aspects of her stepmother's life that support the representation of her as an independent and pioneering women in order to make further claims for women. In 1796 Hannah Kilham joined the Society of Methodists and became an advocate for the poor, for exploited children and for Irish immigrants. She voyaged to Sierra Leone wishing to bring Christianity to its inhabitants and on her third visit to the country she established a school there. Hannah Kilham fought for the rights of slaves and former slaves and against the practices of colonialism and colonial trade. She also produced textbooks for the study of African languages and established herself as a politically astute chronicler of missionary and educational activities.

From bestselling author and provocateur Christopher Hitchens, the classic guide to the art of principled dissent and disagreement In Letters to a Young Contrarian, bestselling author and world-class provocateur Christopher Hitchens inspires the radicals, gadflies, mavericks, rebels, and angry young (wo)men of tomorrow. Exploring the entire range of "contrary positions"--from noble dissident to gratuitous nag--Hitchens introduces the next generation to the minds and the misfits who influenced him, invoking such mentors as Emile Zola, Rosa Parks, and George Orwell. As is his trademark, Hitchens pointedly pitches himself in contrast to stagnant attitudes across the ideological spectrum. No other writer has matched Hitchens's understanding of the importance of disagreement--to personal integrity, to informed discussion, to true progress, to democracy itself.

Behind the walls of a church, Liliana and her baby eat, sleep, and wait. Outside, protestors shout ''Go back to Mexico!'' and ''Tax this political church!'' They demand that the U.S. government deport Liliana, which would separate her from her husband and children. Is Liliana a criminal or a hero? And why does the church protect her? Grace Yukich draws on extensive field observation and interviews to reveal how immigration is changing religious activism in the U.S. In the face of nationwide immigration raids and public hostility toward ''illegal'' immigration, the New Sanctuary Movement emerged in 2007 as a religious force seeking to humanize the image of undocumented immigrants like Liliana. Building coalitions between religious and ethnic groups that had rarely worked together in the past, activists revived and adapted ''sanctuary,'' the tradition of providing shelter for fugitives in houses of worship. Through sanctuary, they called on Americans to support legislation that would keep immigrant families together. But they sought more than political change: they also pursued religious transformation, challenging the religious nationalism in America's faith communities by portraying undocumented immigrants as fellow children of God. Yukich shows progressive religious activists struggling with the competing goals of newly diverse coalitions, fighting to expand the meaning of ''family values'' in a globalizing nation. Through these struggles, the activists both challenged the public dominance of the religious right and created conflicts that could doom their chances of impacting immigration reform.

Lucretia Coffin Mott was one of the most famous and controversial women in nineteenth-century America. Now overshadowed by abolitionists like William Lloyd Garrison and feminists such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Mott was viewed in her time as a dominant figure in the dual struggles for racial and sexual equality. History has often depicted her as a gentle Quaker lady and a mother figure, but her outspoken challenges to authority riled ministers, journalists, politicians, urban mobs, and her fellow Quakers. In the first biography of Mott in a generation, historian Carol Faulkner reveals the motivations of this radical egalitarian from Nantucket. Mott's deep faith and ties to the Society of Friends do not fully explain her activism-her roots in post-Revolutionary New England also shaped her views on slavery, patriarchy, and the church, as well as her expansive interests in peace, temperance, prison reform, religious freedom, and Native American rights. While Mott was known as the "moving spirit" of the first women's rights convention at Seneca Falls, her commitment to women's rights never trumped her support for abolition or racial equality. She envisioned women's rights not as a new and separate movement but rather as an extension of the universal principles of liberty and equality. Mott was among the first white Americans to call for an immediate end to slavery. Her long-term collaboration with white and black women in the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society was remarkable by any standards. Lucretia Mott's Heresy reintroduces readers to an amazing woman whose work and ideas inspired the transformation of American society.

For people of African descent, music constitutes a unique domain of expression. From traditional West African drumming to South African kwaito, from spirituals to hip-hop, Black life and history has been dynamically displayed and contested through sound. Shana Redmond excavates the sonic histories of these communities through a genre emblematic of Black solidarity and citizenship: anthems. An interdisciplinary cultural history, Anthem reveals how this "sound franchise" contributed to the growth and mobilization of the modern, Black citizen. Providing new political frames and aesthetic articulations for protest organizations and activist-musicians, Redmond reveals the anthem as a crucial musical form following World War I. Beginning with the premise that an analysis of the composition, performance, and uses of Black anthems allows for a more complex reading of racial and political formations within the twentieth century, Redmond expands our understanding of how and why diaspora was a formative conceptual and political framework of modern Black identity. By tracing key compositions and performances around the world--from James Weldon Johnson's "Lift Ev'ry Voice and Sing" that mobilized the NAACP to Nina Simone's "To Be Young, Gifted & Black" which became the Black National Anthem of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE)--Anthem develops a robust recording of Black social movements in the twentieth century that will forever alter the way you hear race and nation.

This book examines anti-corporate activism in the United States, including analysis of anti-corporate challenges associated with social movements as diverse as the Civil Rights Movement and the Dolphin-Safe Tuna Movement. Using a unique dataset of protest events in the United States, the book shows that anti-corporate activism is primarily about corporate policies, products, and negligence. Although activists have always been distrustful of corporations and sought to change them, until the 1970s and 1980s, this was primarily accomplished via seeking government regulation of corporations or via organized labor. Sarah A. Soule traces the shift brought about by deregulation and the decline in organized labor, which prompted activists to target corporations directly, often in combination with targeting the state. Using the literatures on contentious and private politics, which are both essential for understanding anti-corporate activism, the book provides a nuanced understanding of the changing focal points of activism directed at corporations.

Antonia Juhasz, a leading activist and expert on corporations and globalization, investigates the true state of the U.S. oil industry, uncovering its virtually unparalleled influence over our elected officials, its lack of regulatory oversight, and the highest profit rates in corporate history. She offers an immediate call to action - a formula for reining in the industry, cutting down its governmental powers, environmental destruction, and movement toward war while reducing global dependence on oil - and proposes a bold yet viable answer: break up the nation's leading oil companies. Drawing on her own detailed historical research, Juhasz explores the parallels between today's companies and Standard Oil, the most powerful corporation of the early 20th century, whose stranglehold on the economy and government was broken only by the vision and persistence of activists and like-minded politicians.

There has been a resurgence of community gardening over the past decade with a wide range of actors seeking to get involved, from health agencies aiming to increase fruit and vegetable consumption to radical social movements searching for symbols of non-capitalist ways of relating and occupying space. Community gardens have become a focal point for local activism in which people are working to contribute to food security, question the erosion of public space, conserve and improve urban environments, develop technologies of sustainable food production, foster community engagement and create neighbourhood solidarity. Drawing on in-depth case studies and social movement theory, Claire Nettle provides a new empirical and theoretical understanding of community gardening as a site of collective social action. This provides not only a more nuanced and complete understanding of community gardening, but also highlights its potential challenges to notions of activism, community, democracy and culture.

From hand-painted signs and stickered slogans to knitted hats and radical badges, craft and protest have always gone together. Combine your passion for making with your desire to make your voice heard with 15 step-by-step craftivism projects. Rebel Crafts is a fun and informative collection of activism-inspired activities created by experienced crafter Hester van Overbeek. Hester will teach you how to screen-print a slogan T-shirt, create bespoke paper for letter-writing campaigns and bring inspiration to your neighbourhood with a handmade mini-library. With your own hands, you can make a difference, resist injustice and spark change in your community. It all starts with craft.

In the personal and frank Confessions of a Free Speech Lawyer, Rodney A. Smolla offers an insider's view on the violent confrontations in Charlottesville during the "summer of hate." Blending memoir, courtroom drama, and a consideration of the unhealed wound of racism in our society, he shines a light on the conflict between the value of free speech and the protection of civil rights. Smolla has spent his career in the thick of these tempestuous and fraught issues, from acting as lead counsel in a famous Supreme Court decision challenging Virginia's law against burning crosses, to serving as co-counsel in a libel suit brought by a fraternity against Rolling Stone magazine for publishing an article alleging that one of the fraternity's initiation rituals included gang rape. Smolla has also been active as a university leader, serving as dean of three law schools and president of one and railing against hate speech and sexual assault on US campuses. Well before the tiki torches cast their ominous shadows across the nation, the city of Charlottesville sought to relocate the Unite the Right rally; Smolla was approached to represent the alt-right groups. Though he declined, he came to wonder what his history of advocacy had wrought. Feeling unsettlingly complicit, he joined the Charlottesville Task Force, and he realized that the events that transpired there had meaning and resonance far beyond a singular time and place. Why, he wonders, has one of our foundational rights created a land in which such tragic clashes happen all too frequently?

It is frequently assumed that the "people" must have something in common or else democracy will fail. This assumption that democracy requires commonality - such as a shared nationality, a common culture, or consensus on a core set of values - sets theorists and political actors alike on a futile search for what we have in common, and it generates misplaced anxiety when it turns out that this commonality is not forthcoming.
In Sharing Democracy, Michaele Ferguson argues that this preoccupation with commonality misdirects our attention toward what we share and away from how we share in democracy. This produces an ironically anti-democratic tendency to emphasize the passive possession of commonality at the expense of promoting the active exercise of political freedom. Ferguson counteracts this tendency by exposing the reasons for the persistent allure of the common. She offers in its stead a radical vision of democracy grounded in political freedom: the capacity of ordinary people to make and remake the world in which they live. This vision of democracy is exemplified in protest marches: cacophonous, unpredictable, and self-authorizing collective enactments of our world-building freedom.
Ferguson develops her radical vision of democracy by drawing on Hannah Arendt's account of how we share a world in common with others, Ludwig Wittgenstein's later philosophy of language, and Linda Zerilli's critique of the essentialist/anti-essentialist debates in feminist theory. She juxtaposes critical readings of democratic theorists with readings of authors in related fields, such as Benedict Anderson, Robert Putnam, and Charles Taylor. Her theoretical argument is illustrated and informed by interpretations of political events, including the Arab Spring, the integration of Little Rock High School, debates over Quebec secession, immigrant rights protests in the US in 2006, and the Occupy movement.

In recent years critics of Romantic poetry have divided into two groups that have little to say to one another. One group, as yet the most numerous, insists that to study a poem is to investigate the historical circumstances out of which it was produced; the other retorts that poetry offers pleasures fully available only to readers whose attention is focused on their language. This book attempts to reconcile the two groups by arguing that a poet's most effective political action is the forging of a new language, and that the political import of a poem is a function of its style.

Recently, there has been a high level of conflict in American politics. Massive disagreements over government policies have pitted one group of Americans against another. This book explores how and why this style of politics developed and argues that fundamental disagreements between Americans have always been at the root of its politics.

Francis Place's autobiography presents a vivid and readable account of the early life of one of the best-known radical reformers of the early 19th century. The publication of Place's manuscript for the first time in book form is a landmark in the expanding field of studies in artisan self-consciousness of the pre-Victorian era. The book will be of obvious value to those interested in the origins of the Reform Movement and especially of the controversial reform group, the London Corresponding society. In his description of the rise and fall of the LCS and of the men who composed it and other reform groups. Place brings to life the human feelings and failings of the working-class democratic movement, and his own lifelong attempts to 'promote the welfare of the working class'.

Women burst onto the political scene in Africa after the 1990s, claiming more than one third of the parliamentary seats in countries like Angola, Mozambique, South Africa, Tanzania, Uganda, and Burundi. Women in Rwanda hold the highest percentage of legislative seats in the world. Women s movements lobbied for constitutional reforms and new legislation to expand women s rights. This book examines the convergence of factors behind these dramatic developments, including the emergence of autonomous women s movements, changes in international and regional norms regarding women s rights and representation, the availability of new resources to advance women s status, and the end of civil conflict. The book focuses on the cases of Cameroon, Uganda, and Mozambique, situating these countries in the broader African context. The authors provide a fascinating analysis of the way in which women are transforming the political landscape in Africa, by bringing to bear their unique perspectives as scholars who have also been parliamentarians, transnational activists, and leaders in these movements.

Rebellion, riot and popular unrest have been the theme of a succession of stimulating and influential articles in Past and Present. This selection shows how the various forms of popular protest in England from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries have been reinterpreted by modern scholars. Topics range from the great Tudor rebellions of 1536 and 1549 to the urban disorders in London and the food riots of the eighteenth century. Behind this variety, however, there were important continuities and similarities. Gathered in a single volume, the essays show how detailed studies of popular protest have transformed our knowledge of popular mentality and its relationship with social and economic change.

The Papers of the London Corresponding Society 1792-1799, first published in 1983, consists of eighteenth-century documents which trace the history of an early working-class reform society organized by a shoemaker and three of his friends. 'Annual Parliaments and Universal Suffrage' was their slogan and their goal. To achieve this reform they believed they must first educate the people to know what their rights were and how to exercise them. So popular were they that over 10,000 men paid to join the Society and over 100,000 people attended their open air meetings. Such numbers alarmed the government, especially since spies reported talk or arming and revolution, of assassinating Pitt and shooting 'royal game'. Unlike many groups which set out to demand their political or social rights, but which scattered as soon as they encountered opposition, the Corresponding Society met openly for over six years despite harassment by police magistrates, interference from press gangs, vilification in newspapers, denunciations in Parliament, introduction of repressive laws, arrest of members, and expensive trials. The blow from which they could not recover was a 1799 Act of Parliament outlawing the Corresponding Society by name.

This book starts out from the deep concern with contemporary tendencies towards depoliticisation of public issues and popular interests and makes a case for rethinking more democratic popular representation. It outlines a framework for popular representation, examines key issues and experiences and provides a policy-oriented conclusion.

This book explores the literary culture of Britain's radical press from 1880 to 1910, a time that saw a flourishing of radical political activity as well as the emergence of a mass print industry. While Enlightenment radicals and their heirs had seen free print as an agent of revolutionary transformation, socialist, anarchist and other radicals of this later period suspected that a mass public could not exist outside the capitalist system. In response, they purposely reduced the scale of print by appealing to a small, counter-cultural audience. "Slow print," like "slow food" today, actively resisted industrial production and the commercialization of new domains of life.
Drawing on under-studied periodicals and archives, this book uncovers a largely forgotten literary-political context. It looks at the extensive debate within the radical press over how to situate radical values within an evolving media ecology, debates that engaged some of the most famous writers of the era (William Morris and George Bernard Shaw), a host of lesser-known figures (theosophical socialist and birth control reformer Annie Besant, gay rights pioneer Edward Carpenter, and proto-modernist editor Alfred Orage), and countless anonymous others.

This volume fills this gap by examining the many ways in which political parties, the business world, foreign policymakers, and the intelligence community experienced, confronted, and even actively contributed to domestic and transnational forms of dissent.

Asked to name an activist, many people think of someone like Cesar Chavez or Rosa Parks--someone uniquely and passionately devoted to a cause. Yet, two-thirds of Americans report having belonged to a social movement, attended a protest, or engaged in some form of contentious political activity. Activism, in other words, is something that the vast majority of people engage in. This book examines these more common experiences to ask how and when people choose to engage with political causes.
Corrigall-Brown reveals how individual characteristics and life experiences impact the pathway of participation, illustrating that the context and period in which a person engages are critical. This is the real picture of activism, one in which many people engage, in a multitude of ways and with varying degrees of continuity. This book challenges the current conceptualization of activism and pushes us to more systematically examine the varying ways that individuals participate in contentious politics over their lifetimes.