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Overview
A Choice Outstanding Academic Title of 2006! From the 1950s to the 1970s, a host of movements struggled to make democracy and equality realities in America. A radical conception of democracy animated the movements for civil rights and black power, for peace and solidarity with the Third World, and for gender and sexual equality. From Vietnam to the war at home against African and Native Americans, Chicanos, Puerto Ricans, and Asian Americans, from Women's to Gay Liberation, the New Left was the broadest-based movement for fundamental change in American history. This book synthesizes and chronicles those protests, confrontations, victories, and defeats over two decades and more. It has a much wider chronological focus than just the decade of the 1960s, and is the most inclusive and broadest ranging analytical synthesis of the New Left yet published.
Synopsis
A Choice Outstanding Academic Title of 2006!
From the 1950s to the 1970s, a host of movements struggled to make democracy and equality realities in America. A radical conception of democracy animated the movements for civil rights and black power, for peace and solidarity with the Third World, and for gender and sexual equality. From Vietnam to the war at home against African and Native Americans, Chicanos, Puerto Ricans, and Asian Americans, from Women's to Gay Liberation, the New Left was the broadest-based movement for fundamental change in American history. This book synthesizes and chronicles those protests, confrontations, victories, and defeats over two decades and more. It has a much wider chronological focus than just the decade of the 1960s, and is the most inclusive and broadest ranging analytical synthesis of the New Left yet published.
Editorials
From the Publisher
"Gosse's rethinking of the New Left provides an interesting and provocative framework within which to view the Sixties."--Register of the Kentucky Historical Society "Van Gosse has long been the leading voice of the post-1960s generation of historians of the 1960s. In Rethinking the New Left he has written a clear, lively, provocative, and wide-ranging history of the New Left. Rethinking the New Left will become the first stop for those looking for a concise, yet comprehensive, introduction to social movements of the 1960s and how they changed America for the better."--Roy Rosenzweig, Director, Center for History & New Media, George Mason University "Rethinking the New Left is a compelling and rigorous study of what truly was a 'movement of movements.' Correctly rejecting the notion that the New Left was synonymous with white college students, Van Gosse offers an in depth historical analysis of the various forces and social movements that brought about the political earthquake that was the '60s. Rethinking the New Left is as exciting to read as it is thought-provoking in recounting the courage and audacity of overlapping generations of activists who refused to sit still in the face of domestic and global injustice. Rethinking the New Left leaves the reader with issues to ponder as progressives consider new directions for transformative politics in the 21st century."--Bill Fletcher, Jr., President, TransAfrica Forum. "Rethinking the New Left is a refreshing account of social movements that goes beyond standard mythologies about the tumultuous 1960's. Broad in scope and accessible as well as analytic, Van Gosse's book is both a fast-paced history of New Left radicalism and a provocation to think anew about its countours and long-term impact."--Max Elbaum, author of Revolution in the Air: Sixties Radicals Turn to Lenin, Mao, and Che
"I'd like to echo van Gosse's very sensible plea that we focus primarily on the social movements that made 'the 60s' rather than on the possible limitations of the largely mythic idea of 'the 60s.' What's more, I highly recommend Rethinking the New Left: it is must read material for folks like ourselves."
--Jeremy Varon, author of Bringing the War Home