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The Fifties - An Underground History (Hardcover)
Loot Price: R510
Discovery Miles 5 100
You Save: R115
(18%)
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The Fifties - An Underground History (Hardcover)
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List price R625
Loot Price R510
Discovery Miles 5 100
You Save R115 (18%)
Expected to ship within 9 - 15 working days
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A bold and original argument that upends the myth of the Fifties as
a decade of conformity to celebrate the solitary, brave, and
stubborn individuals who pioneered the radical gay rights,
feminist, civil rights, and environmental movements, from historian
James R. Gaines. In a fascinating and beautifully written series of
character portraits, The Fifties invokes the accidental
radicals-people motivated not by politics but by their own most
intimate conflicts-who sparked movements for change in their time
and our own. Among many others, we meet the legal pathfinder Pauli
Murray, who was tortured by both her mixed-race heritage and her
"in between" sexuality. Through years of hard work and
self-examination, she turned her demons into historic victories.
Ruth Bader Ginsberg credited her for the argument that made sex
discrimination illegal, but that was only one of her gifts to
21st-century feminism. We meet Harry Hay, who dreamed of a national
gay-rights movement as early as the mid-1940s, a time when the US,
Soviet Union, and Nazi Germany viewed gay people as subversives and
mentally ill. And in perhaps the book's unlikeliest pairing, we
hear the prophetic voices of Silent Spring's Rachel Carson and
MIT's preeminent mathematician, Norbert Wiener, who from their very
different perspectives-she in the living world, he in the
theoretical one-converged on the then-heretical idea that our
mastery over the natural world carried the potential for disaster.
Their legacy is the environmental movement. The Fifties is a
dazzling and provocative work of history that transforms our
understanding of a seemingly staid decade and honors the pioneers
of gay rights, feminism, civil rights, and environmentalism. The
book carries the powerful message that change actually begins not
in mass movements and new legislation but in the lives of
de-centered, often lonely individuals, who learn to fight for
change in a daily struggle with themselves.
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