Download or read book A Radical History of the World written by Neil Faulkner and published by Pluto Press (UK). This book was released on 2018 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the hunter-gatherers two million years ago to the ancient empires of Persia and China, and from the Russian Revolution to modern imperialism, humans have always struggled to create a better society than what came before. All over the world at numerous points in the past, a different way of life has become an absolute necessity, over and over again. This is a history of the humans in these struggles--the hominid and the hunter, the emperor and the slave, the dictator and the revolutionary. Reading against the grain of mainstream histories, Neil Faulkner reveals that what happened in the past has never been predetermined. From antiquity to feudalism, and from fascism to our precarious political present, choices have always been numerous and complex, and the possible outcomes have ranged broadly between liberation and barbarism. Rejecting the top-down approach of conventional history, Faulkner contends that it is the mass action of ordinary people that drives the transformative events of our many histories. This is a history of power, abuse, and greed, but also one of liberation, progress, and solidarity. In our fraught political present--as we face the loss of civil liberties and environmental protections, the rise of ethnonationalism, and the looming threat of nuclear war--we need the perspective of these histories now more than ever. The lesson of A Radical History of the World is that, if we created our past, we can also create a better future.
Download or read book The Young Lords written by Johanna Fernández and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2019-12-18 with total page 481 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Against the backdrop of America's escalating urban rebellions in the 1960s, an unexpected cohort of New York radicals unleashed a series of urban guerrilla actions against the city's racist policies and contempt for the poor. Their dramatic flair, uncompromising socialist vision for a new society, skillful ability to link local problems to international crises, and uncompromising vision for a new society riveted the media, alarmed New York's political class, and challenged nationwide perceptions of civil rights and black power protest. The group called itself the Young Lords. Utilizing oral histories, archival records, and an enormous cache of police surveillance files released only after a decade-long Freedom of Information Law request and subsequent court battle, Johanna Fernandez has written the definitive account of the Young Lords, from their roots as a Chicago street gang to their rise and fall as a political organization in New York. Led by poor and working-class Puerto Rican youth, and consciously fashioned after the Black Panther Party, the Young Lords occupied a hospital, blocked traffic with uncollected garbage, took over a church, tested children for lead poisoning, defended prisoners, fought the military police, and fed breakfast to poor children. Their imaginative, irreverent protests and media conscious tactics won reforms, popularized socialism in the United States and exposed U.S. mainland audiences to the country's quiet imperial project in Puerto Rico. Fernandez challenges what we think we know about the sixties. She shows that movement organizers were concerned with finding solutions to problems as pedestrian as garbage collection and the removal of lead paint from tenement walls; gentrification; lack of access to medical care; childcare for working mothers; and the warehousing of people who could not be employed in deindustrialized cities. The Young Lords' politics and preoccupations, especially those concerning the rise of permanent unemployment foretold the end of the American Dream. In riveting style, Fernandez demonstrates how the Young Lords redefined the character of protest, the color of politics, and the cadence of popular urban culture in the age of great dreams.
Download or read book Radical History and the Politics of Art written by Gabriel Rockhill and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2014-07-15 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Gabriel Rockhill opens new space for rethinking the relationship between art and politics. Rather than understanding the two spheres as separated by an insurmountable divide or linked by a privileged bridge, Rockhill demonstrates that art and politics are not fixed entities with a singular relation but rather dynamically negotiated, sociohistorical practices with shifting and imprecise borders. Radical History and the Politics of Art proposes a significant departure from extant debates on what is commonly called "art" and "politics," and the result is an impressive foray into the force field of history, in which cultural practices are meticulously analyzed in their social and temporal dynamism without assuming a conceptual unity behind them. Rockhill thereby develops an alternative logic of history and historical change, as well as a novel account of social practices and a multidimensional theory of agency. Engaging with a diverse array of intellectual, artistic, and political constellations, this tour de force diligently maps the various interactions between different dimensions of aesthetic and political practices as they intertwine and sometimes merge in precise fields of struggle.
Download or read book Radical Roots written by Denise D. Meringolo and published by Amherst College Press. This book was released on 2021 with total page 633 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While all history has the potential to be political, public history is uniquely so: public historians engage in historical inquiry outside the bubble of scholarly discourse, relying on social networks, political goals, practices, and habits of mind that differ from traditional historians. Radical Roots: Public History and a Tradition of Social Justice Activism theorizes and defines public history as future-focused, committed to the advancement of social justice, and engaged in creating a more inclusive public record. Edited by Denise D. Meringolo and with contributions from the field's leading figures, this groundbreaking collection addresses major topics such as museum practices, oral history, grassroots preservation, and community-based learning. It demonstrates the core practices that have shaped radical public history, how they have been mobilized to promote social justice, and how public historians can facilitate civic discourse in order to promote equality. "This is a much-needed recalibration, as professional organizations and practitioners across genres of public history struggle to diversify their own ranks and to bring contemporary activists into the fold." -- Catherine Gudis, University of California, Riverside. "Taken all together, the articles in this volume highlight the persistent threads of justice work that has characterized the multifaceted history of public history as well as the challenges faced in doing that work."--Patricia Mooney-Melvin, The Public Historian
Download or read book The Portland Red Guide written by Michael Munk and published by . This book was released on 2011 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A historical guidebook of social dissent, Michael Munk's The Portland Red Guide describes local radicals, their organizations, and their activities in relation to physical sites in the Rose City. With the aid of maps and historical photos, Munk's stories are those that history books often exclude. The historical listings expand readers' perspectives of the unique city and its radical past. The Portland Red Guide is a testament to Portland's rich history of working-class people and organizations that stood against repression and injustice. It honors those who insisted on pursuing a better justification for their lives rather than the quest for material wealth, and who dedicated themselves to offering alternative visions of how to organize society. The Portland Red Guide uses maps to give readers a walking tour of the city as well as to illustrate sites such as the house where Woody Guthrie wrote his Columbia River songs; the office of the Red Squad (the only memorial to John Reed); the home of early feminist Dr. Marie Equi; and the downtown site of Portland's first Afro-American League protest in 1898. This new edition includes up-to-date information about Portland's most contemporary radicals and suggests routes to help readers walk in the shadows of dissidents, radicals, and revolutionaries. These stories challenge mainstream culture and testify that many in Portland were, and still are, motivated to improve the condition of the world rather than their personal status in it.
Download or read book Extinction written by Ashley Dawson and published by OR Books. This book was released on 2016-08-01 with total page 114 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Some thousands of years ago, the world was home to an immense variety of large mammals. From wooly mammoths and saber-toothed tigers to giant ground sloths and armadillos the size of automobiles, these spectacular creatures roamed freely. Then human beings arrived. Devouring their way down the food chain as they spread across the planet, they began a process of voracious extinction that has continued to the present. Headlines today are made by the existential threat confronting remaining large animals such as rhinos and pandas. But the devastation summoned by humans extends to humbler realms of creatures including beetles, bats and butterflies. Researchers generally agree that the current extinction rate is nothing short of catastrophic. Currently the earth is losing about a hundred species every day. This relentless extinction, Ashley Dawson contends in a primer that combines vast scope with elegant precision, is the product of a global attack on the commons, the great trove of air, water, plants and creatures, as well as collectively created cultural forms such as language, that have been regarded traditionally as the inheritance of humanity as a whole. This attack has its genesis in the need for capital to expand relentlessly into all spheres of life. Extinction, Dawson argues, cannot be understood in isolation from a critique of our economic system. To achieve this we need to transgress the boundaries between science, environmentalism and radical politics. Extinction: A Radical History performs this task with both brio and brilliance.
Download or read book A Radical History Of Britain written by Edward Vallance and published by Abacus. This book was released on 2013-04-04 with total page 539 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From medieval Runnymede to twentieth-century Jarrow, from King Alfred to George Orwell by way of John Lilburne and Mary Wollstonecraft, a rich and colourful thread of radicalism runs through a thousand years of British history. In this fascinating study, Edward Vallance traces a national tendency towards revolution, irreverence and reform wherever it surfaces and in all its variety. He unveils the British people who fought and died for religious freedom, universal suffrage, justice and liberty - and shows why, now more than ever, their heroic achievements must be celebrated. Beginning with Magna Carta, Vallance subjects the touchstones of British radicalism to rigorous scrutiny. He evokes the figureheads of radical action, real and mythic - Robin Hood and Captain Swing, Wat Tyler, Ned Ludd, Thomas Paine and Emmeline Pankhurst - and the popular movements that bore them. Lollards and Levellers, Diggers, Ranters and Chartists, each has its membership, principles and objectives revealed.
Download or read book The Radical Reader written by Timothy Patrick McCarthy and published by The New Press. This book was released on 2011-05-10 with total page 706 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Radicalism is as American as apple pie. One can scarcely imagine what American society would look like without the abolitionists, feminists, socialists, union organizers, civil-rights workers, gay and lesbian activists, and environmentalists who have fought stubbornly to breathe life into the promises of freedom and equality that lie at the heart of American democracy. The first anthology of its kind, The Radical Reader brings together more than 200 primary documents in a comprehensive collection of the writings of America's native radical tradition. Spanning the time from the colonial period to the twenty-first century, the documents have been drawn from a wealth of sources—speeches, manifestos, newspaper editorials, literature, pamphlets, and private letters. From Thomas Paine's “Common Sense” to Kate Millett's “Sexual Politics,” these are the documents that sparked, guided, and distilled the most influential movements in American history. Brief introductory essays by the editors provide a rich biographical and historical context for each selection included.
Download or read book Radical written by Kate Pickert and published by . This book was released on 2020-09-29 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Kate Pickert worked as a health-care journalist and knew medical treatment well, but it all changed when she was diagnosed with an aggressive type of breast cancer at age 35. Pickert used her journalistic skills to identify the cultural, scientific, and historical forces shaping the lives of breast-cancer patients in the modern age.
Download or read book The Life and Death of the Radical Historical Jesus written by David Burns and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2013-02-28 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This unconventional cultural history explores the lifecycle of the radical historical Jesus, a construct created by the freethinkers, feminists, socialists and anarchists who used the findings of biblical criticism to mount a serious challenge to the authority of elite liberal divines during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era.
Download or read book This Radical Land written by Daegan Miller and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2018-03-22 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “The American people sees itself advance across the wilderness, draining swamps, straightening rivers, peopling the solitude, and subduing nature,” wrote Alexis de Tocqueville in 1835. That’s largely how we still think of nineteenth-century America today: a country expanding unstoppably, bending the continent’s natural bounty to the national will, heedless of consequence. A country of slavery and of Indian wars. There’s much truth in that vision. But if you know where to look, you can uncover a different history, one of vibrant resistance, one that’s been mostly forgotten. This Radical Land recovers that story. Daegan Miller is our guide on a beautifully written, revelatory trip across the continent during which we encounter radical thinkers, settlers, and artists who grounded their ideas of freedom, justice, and progress in the very landscapes around them, even as the runaway engine of capitalism sought to steamroll everything in its path. Here we meet Thoreau, the expert surveyor, drawing anticapitalist property maps. We visit a black antislavery community in the Adirondack wilderness of upstate New York. We discover how seemingly commercial photographs of the transcontinental railroad secretly sent subversive messages, and how a band of utopian anarchists among California’s sequoias imagined a greener, freer future. At every turn, everyday radicals looked to landscape for the language of their dissent—drawing crucial early links between the environment and social justice, links we’re still struggling to strengthen today. Working in a tradition that stretches from Thoreau to Rebecca Solnit, Miller offers nothing less than a new way of seeing the American past—and of understanding what it can offer us for the present . . . and the future.
Download or read book Radical Future Pasts written by Romand Coles and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2014-06-17 with total page 543 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Written by both well-established and rising new scholars, Radical Future Pasts seeks to open up new possibilities for the practical application of political thought. Unlike conventional "state of the discipline" collections, this volume does not summarize where the field of political theory has been. Rather than accept traditional versions of the political past, the contributors reinterpret both canonical and current texts to demonstrate how politics can be theorized and applied in new ways.
Download or read book A New History of Life written by Peter Ward and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2015-04-07 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The history of life on Earth is, in some form or another, known to us all--or so we think. A New History of Life offers a provocative new account, based on the latest scientific research, of how life on our planet evolved--the first major new synthesis for general readers in two decades. Charles Darwin's theories, first published more than 150 years ago, form the backbone of how we understand the history of the Earth. In reality, the currently accepted history of life on Earth is so flawed, so out of date, that it's past time we need a 'New History of Life.' In their latest book, Joe Kirschvink and Peter Ward will show that many of our most cherished beliefs about the evolution of life are wrong. Gathering and analyzing years of discoveries and research not yet widely known to the public, A New History of Life proposes a different origin of species than the one Darwin proposed, one which includes eight-foot-long centipedes, a frozen “snowball Earth”, and the seeds for life originating on Mars. Drawing on their years of experience in paleontology, biology, chemistry, and astrobiology, experts Ward and Kirschvink paint a picture of the origins life on Earth that are at once too fabulous to imagine and too familiar to dismiss--and looking forward, A New History of Life brilliantly assembles insights from some of the latest scientific research to understand how life on Earth can and might evolve far into the future.
Download or read book Take Hold of Our History written by Harvey J. Kaye and published by John Hunt Publishing. This book was released on 2019-10-25 with total page 147 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The eighteen essays and speeches in Take Hold of Our History render a manifesto – a call to remember, redeem, and embrace the American radical story and tradition in favor of cultivating American historical memory and imagination and making America radical once again. For too long we have allowed the right to hijack the past and suppress, efface, lie about, and/or appropriate the essentially radical story of America from the struggles of the Revolution to those of the Age of Roosevelt and the 1960s. And no less tragically, we on the left, apparently haunted by the worst of our national experience, have turned our back on our own story and deferred to the tales of conservatives and reactionaries. Fleeing from the past, we merely compound the tragedies and ironies of American history, for we turn our backs on both the nation’s democratic creed and radical imperative, but also the struggles from the bottom up, the struggles in which working people and others have laid hold of America’s revolutionary promise and succeeded in making the United States freer, more equal and more democratic, at times, radically so. As Bill Moyers put it in 2008: “Here in the first decade of the twenty-first century the story that becomes America’s dominant narrative will shape our collective imagination and our politics for a long time.” The time has come for us to advance that narrative.
Download or read book A History of Utah Radicalism written by John S. McCormick and published by University Press of Colorado. This book was released on 2023-06-15 with total page 488 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Utah, now one of the most conservative states, has a long tradition of left-wing radicalism. Early Mormon settlers set a precedent with the United Order and other experiments with a socialistic economy. The tradition continued into the more recent past with New Left, anti-apartheid, and other radicals. Throughout, Utah radicalism usually reflected national and international developments. Recounting its long history, McCormick and Sillito focus especially on the Socialist Party of America, which reached a peak of political influence in the first two decades of the twentieth century—in Utah and across the nation. At least 115 Socialists in over two dozen Utah towns and cities were elected to office in that period, and on seven occasions they controlled governments of five different municipalities. This is a little-known story worth a closer look. Histories of Socialism in the United States have tended to forsake attention to specific, local cases and situations in favor of broader overviews of the movement. By looking closely at Utah's experience, this book helps unravel how American Socialism briefly flowered before rapidly withering in the early twentieth century. It also broadens the conventional understanding of Utah history.
Download or read book When It Was Grand written by LeeAnna Keith and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2020-01-14 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Civil War Monitor best book of 2020 A group biography of the activists who defended human rights and defined the Republican Party’s greatest hour In 1862, the ardent abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison summarized the events that were tearing apart the United States: “There is a war because there was a Republican Party. There was a Republican Party because there was an Abolition Party. There was an Abolition Party because there was Slavery.” Garrison’s simple statement expresses the essential truths at the heart of LeeAnna Keith’s When It Was Grand. Here is the full story, dramatically told, of the Radical Republicans—the champions of abolition who helped found a new political party and turn it toward the extirpation of slavery. Keith introduces us to the idealistic Massachusetts preachers and philanthropists, rugged Midwestern politicians, and African American activists who collaborated to protect escaped slaves from their captors, to create and defend black military regiments and win the contest for the soul of their party. Keith’s fast-paced, deeply researched narrative gives us new perspective on figures ranging from Ralph Waldo Emerson and John Brown, to the gruff antislavery general John Fremont and his astute wife, Jessie Benton Fremont, and the radicals’ sometime critic and sometime partner Abraham Lincoln. In the 1850s and 1860s, a powerful faction of the Republican Party stood for a demanding ideal of racial justice—and insisted that their party and nation live up to it. Here is a colorful, definitive account of their indelible accomplishment.
Download or read book Radical L A written by Errol Wayne Stevens and published by University of Oklahoma Press. This book was released on 2012-11-20 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When the depression of the 1890s prompted unemployed workers from Los Angeles to join a nationwide march on Washington, “Coxey’s Army” marked the birth of radicalism in that city. In this first book to trace the subsequent struggle between the radical left and L.A.’s power structure, Errol Wayne Stevens tells how both sides shaped the city’s character from the turn of the twentieth century through the civil rights era. On the radical right, Los Angeles’s business elite, supported by the Los Angeles Times, sought the destruction of the trade-union movement—defended on the left by socialists, Wobblies, communists, and other groups. In portraying the conflict between leftist and capitalist visions for the future, Stevens brings to life colorful personalities such as Times publisher Harrison Gray Otis and Socialist mayoral candidate Job Harriman. He also re-creates events such as the 1910 bombing of the Times building, the savage suppression of the 1923 longshoremen’s strike, and the 1965 Watts riots, which signaled that L.A. politics had become divided less along class lines than by complex racial and ethnic differences. The book takes stock of the rivalry between right and left over the several decades in which it repeatedly flared. Radical L.A. is a balanced work of meticulous scholarship that pieces together a rich chronicle usually seen only in smaller snippets or from a single vantage point. It will change the way we see the history of the City of Angels.
