[PDF] Radicals In The Heartland eBook

Author : Michael V. Metz
Publisher : University of Illinois Press
Page : 461 pages
File Size : 25,42 MB
Release : 2019-04-16
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 0252051254

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In 1969, the campus tumult that defined the Sixties reached a flash point at the University of Illinois. Out-of-town radicals preached armed revolution. Students took to the streets and fought police and National Guardsmen. Firebombs were planted in lecture halls while explosions rocked a federal building on one side of town and a recruiting office on the other. Across the state, the powers-that-be expressed shock that such events could take place at Illinois's esteemed, conservative, flagship university—how could it happen here, of all places? Positioning the events in the context of their time, Michael V. Metz delves into the lives and actions of activists at the center of the drama. A participant himself, Metz draws on interviews, archives, and newspaper records to show a movement born in demands for free speech, inspired by a movement for civil rights, and driven to the edge by a seemingly never-ending war. If the sudden burst of irrational violence baffled parents, administrators, and legislators, it seemed inevitable to students after years of official intransigence and disregard. Metz portrays campus protesters not as angry, militant extremists but as youthful citizens deeply engaged with grave moral issues, embodying the idealism, naiveté, and courage of a minority of a generation.

Author : Toni Gilpin
Publisher : Haymarket Books
Page : 458 pages
File Size : 35,95 MB
Release : 2020-02-25
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 1642590894

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“The definitive history of an important but largely forgotten labor organization and its heroic struggles with an icon of industrial capitalism.” —Ahmed A. White, author of The Last Great Strike This rich history details the bitter, deep-rooted conflict between industrial behemoth International Harvester and the uniquely radical Farm Equipment Workers union. The Long Deep Grudge makes clear that class warfare has been, and remains, integral to the American experience, providing up-close-and-personal and long-view perspectives from both sides of the battle lines. International Harvester—and the McCormick family that largely controlled it—garnered a reputation for bare-knuckled union-busting in the 1880s, but in the twentieth century also pioneered sophisticated union-avoidance techniques that have since become standard corporate practice. On the other side the militant Farm Equipment Workers union, connected to the Communist Party, mounted a vociferous challenge to the cooperative ethos that came to define the American labor movement after World War II. This evocative account, stretching back to the nineteenth century and carried through to the present, reads like a novel. Biographical sketches of McCormick family members, union officials and rank-and-file workers are woven into the narrative, along with anarchists, jazz musicians, Wall Street financiers, civil rights crusaders, and mob lawyers. It touches on pivotal moments and movements as wide-ranging as the Haymarket “riot,” the Flint sit-down strikes, the Memorial Day Massacre, the McCarthy-era anti-communist purges, and America’s late twentieth-century industrial decline. “A capitalist family dynasty, a radical union, and a revolution in how and where work gets done—Toni Gilpin’s The Long Deep Grudge is a detailed chronicle of one of the most active battlefronts in our ever-evolving class war.” —John Sayles

Author : Gretchen Heefner
Publisher : Harvard University Press
Page : 321 pages
File Size : 28,59 MB
Release : 2012-09-10
Category : History
ISBN : 0674067460

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In the 1960s the Air Force buried 1,000 ICBMs in pastures across the Great Plains to keep U.S. nuclear strategy out of view. As rural civilians of all political stripes found themselves living in the Soviet crosshairs, a proud Plains individualism gave way to an economic dependence on the military-industrial complex that still persists today.

Author : Melissa Ford
Publisher : SIU Press
Page : 240 pages
File Size : 47,97 MB
Release : 2022-04-28
Category : History
ISBN : 0809338564

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Uncovering the social revolution led by Black women in the heartland In this first study of Black radicalism in midwestern cities before the civil rights movement, Melissa Ford connects the activism of Black women who championed justice during the Great Depression to those involved in the Ferguson Uprising and the Black Lives Matter movement. A Brick and a Bible examines how African American working-class women, many of whom had just migrated to “the promised land” only to find hunger, cold, and unemployment, forged a region of revolutionary potential. A Brick and a Bible theorizes a tradition of Midwestern Black radicalism, a praxis-based ideology informed by but divergent from American Communism. Midwestern Black radicalism that contests that interlocking systems of oppression directly relates the distinct racial, political, geographic, economic, and gendered characteristics that make up the American heartland. This volume illustrates how, at the risk of their careers, their reputations, and even their lives, African American working-class women in the Midwest used their position to shape a unique form of social activism. Case studies of Detroit, St. Louis, Chicago, and Cleveland—hotbeds of radical activism—follow African American women across the Midwest as they participated in the Ford Hunger March, organized the Funsten Nut Pickers’ strike, led the Sopkin Dressmakers’ strike, and supported the Unemployed Councils and the Scottsboro Boys’ defense. Ford profoundly reimagines how we remember and interpret these “ordinary” women doing extraordinary things across the heartland. Once overlooked, their activism shaped a radical tradition in midwestern cities that continues to be seen in cities like Ferguson and Minneapolis today.

Author : Eric Leif Davin
Publisher : Lexington Books
Page : 464 pages
File Size : 18,87 MB
Release : 2012-07-10
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 0739122398

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Working people created a new America in the 1930s and 1940s which was a fundamental departure from the feudalistic and hierarchical America which existed before. In the process, class politics re-defined the political agenda of America as—for the first and time in American history—the political universe polarized along class lines. The author explores the meaning of the new deal political mobilization by ordinary people by examining the changes it brought to the local, county, and state levels in Pittsburgh, Allegheny County, and Pennsylvania as a whole.

Author : Catherine McNicol Stock
Publisher : Cornell University Press
Page : 248 pages
File Size : 47,6 MB
Release : 1996
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 9780801432941

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Stock examines recurring themes in rural radical movements, including anti-federalism, white supremacy, populism, and vigilantism. She beleives we need to understand both the historic roots and the diverse manifestations of rural radicalism in order to make some sense of the action that tore a hole in this country's heartland in the spring of 1995. 8 photos. 2 maps.

Author : DAVID. RUBIN
Publisher : Shiloh Israel Press
Page : 272 pages
File Size : 27,79 MB
Release : 2021-04-15
Category :
ISBN : 9781736201602

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New York City - the Big Apple - transformed to a ghost town, where peaceful citizens dare not tread. Macy's - symbol of American free enterprise - shut down. Rioting, looting, murder, attacks on police, destruction of monuments to American heroes in numerous American cities, all in the guise of "protests" against racism. In a year of wild insurrection, there was a disturbing, eerie silence - even words of support for rioters from leading Democrat politicians. Why justify or ignore blatant expressions of violence and hatred? Is there a broader political agenda? Could it be that thought police, Big Tech monopolies, and revisionist historians have had a role to play in all of this? The world was shocked by what seemed to be an outbreak of polarization in America, or even an attempted Marxist revolution, but Israelis were stunned by some striking parallels. As a nation of former slaves and exiles, Israel and the Jews have seen disproportionate persecution, hardship, and death, but have always emerged, from darkness to light. Furthermore, the modern State of Israel had struggled for decades with its own brand of socialism, and it continues to confront terrorist threats and propaganda warfare from radical Palestinians, along with sophisticated collusion by their supporters on the radical Left. There is, indeed, a radical plan to change the USA from a nation of traditional values - God, family, and hard work - to a neo-Marxist, gender and ethnically confused reality that sees the land of the free as an evil force in the world. What lessons can America learn from Israel - from its successes and from its mistakes? In Confronting Radicals: What America Can Learn from Israel, author David Rubin boldly identifies the critical, existential challenges facing America, and, most importantly, provides the necessary solutions, direct from the Biblical heartland of Israel.

Author : Daniel Jaster
Publisher : Springer Nature
Page : 224 pages
File Size : 18,91 MB
Release : 2021-04-09
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 3030710130

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This book explores those who long for “bygone utopias,” times before rapid, culturally destructive social change stripped individuals of their perceived agency. The case of the wave of foreclosure protests that swept through the rural American Midwest during the 1930s illustrates these themes. These actions embodied a utopian understanding of agrarian society that had largely disappeared by the late 19th century: hundreds to thousands of people fixed public auctions of foreclosed farms, returning owners’ property and giving them a second chance to save their farm. Comparisons to later movements, including the National Farmers’ Organization and the protests surrounding the 1980s Farm Crisis highlight the importance of culturally catastrophic social change occurring at a breakneck pace in fomenting these types of bygone utopian actions. These activists and movements should cause scholars to re-think what it means to be conservative and how we view conservatism, helping us better understand why we’re seeing a contemporary resurgence in nationalist and reactionary movements across the globe.

Author : Hal D. Sears
Publisher : University Press of Kansas
Page : 354 pages
File Size : 36,78 MB
Release : 2021-10-29
Category : History
ISBN : 0700631690

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This volume provides the first account of the pioneering efforts at sex reform in America from the Gilded Age to the Progressive era. Despite the atmosphere of extreme prudery and the existence of the Comstock laws after the Civil War, a group of radicals emerged to attack conventional beliefs about sex, from traditional marriage to women’s chattel status in society. These men and women had in common a direct, unrespectable, iconoclastic style. They put forth outrageous journalism and had a penchant for martyrdom and for using the courts to publicize their ideologies. From rare and generally unknown sources, Hal D. Sears pieced together the story of the sex radicals and their surprising ideas. Moses Harman, a minister turned abolitionist and freethinker, is a central figure in the narrative. His Lucifer, the Light Bearer, the only journal of sexual liberty published from the early 1880s to 1907, was dedicated to free love, sex education, women’s rights, and related causes. To a great degree Harman’s publication defines the limits of social dissent in the late nineteenth century. Other members of the sex radical circle included E. B. Foote, a medical doctor who made a fortune with a home medical book crammed with sex information; Edwin Walker and Lillian Harman, who became a cause célèbre among radicals when their jailhouse honeymoon in Kansas challenged the right of the state to regulate marriage; Elmina Slenker, who promoted a theory of sexual energy sublimation and the idea that women were the superior sex; and Lois Waisbrooker, Dora Forster, Lillie White, and other feminists who, almost a century ago, taught and preached the very ideas we hear today in the women’s movement. Of course, all these people got into trouble with the law, mostly through the machinations of their archvillain, Anthony Comstock. Sears examines Comstock’s powers of postal censorship and describes Comstock’s personal vendettas against sexual dissenters, particularly the free love philosopher Ezra Heywood. He gives a legal history of obscenity and explains the sex radicals’ significance in the emergence of obscenity law. Although the sex radicals attest the important reform vitality of provincial culture in late nineteenth-century America, until now they have been almost ignored by historians. Those who have studied sex radicalism at all, apart from its communitarian and sectarian aspects, have viewed it merely as a subsidiary of the more respectable feminist movement. In this book Sears gives careful consideration to the links between sex radicalism and spiritualism, feminism, anticlericalism, anarchism, and the free-thought movement. He presents sex radicalism as a separate and unique movement which illuminates new reaches of the Victorian landscape and establishes a tradition for present-day liberation trends.

Author : Ian McKay
Publisher : Between The Lines
Page : 265 pages
File Size : 28,47 MB
Release : 2005
Category : Canada
ISBN : 1896357970

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An engaging introduction to the vibrant history of the political left in Canada