Seven Social Movements That Changed America (eBook)

Linda Gordon (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2025
528 Seiten
Liveright (Verlag)
978-1-63149-372-0 (ISBN)

Infos

A brilliantly conceived and provocative work from an award-winning historian that examines how seven twentieth-century social movements transformed America.How do social movements arise, wield power, and bring about meaningful change? Renowned scholar Linda Gordon investigates these and other salient questions in this visionary, cautionary, timely, and utterly necessary book (Nicole Eustace), narrating how some of Americas most influential twentieth-century social movements transformed the nation.Beginning with the turn-of-the century settlement house movement, the book compares Chicagos celebrated Hull-House, begun by privileged women, to a much less well known African American project, Clevelands Phillis Wheatley House, begun by a former sharecropper. Expanding her highly praised book The Second Coming of the KKK, the second chapter shows how a northern Klan became a mass movement in the 1920s. Contrary to what many Klan opponents thought, this KKK was a middle-class organization, its members primarily urban and well educated. In the 1930s, the KKK gave birth to dozens of American fascist groupssmall but extremely violent. Profiles of two other 1930s movements follow: the Townsend campaign for old-age insurance, named for its charismatic leader, Dr. Francis Townsend. It created the public pressure that brought us Social Security, which was considered radical at the time, as was the movement to bring about federal unemployment aid for millions.Proceeding to the 19551956 Montgomery bus boycottwhich jump-started the career of Martin Luther King, Jr.the narrative shows how the citys entire Black population refused to ride segregated buses; initiated by Black women, their years-long, hard-fought victory inspired the civil rights movement. Gordon then examines the 1970s farmworkers struggle, led by Cesar Chavez and made possible by the work of tens of thousands of the primarily Mexican American farmworkers. Together they built the United Farm Workers Union, winning better wages and working conditions for some of the countrys poorest workers. The book concludes with the dramatic stories of two Boston socialist feminist groups, Bread and Roses and the Combahee River Collective, which influenced the whole womens liberation movement.Throughout the work, Gordon concentrates not on ideologies but on how millions of grassroots activists strategized and changed the United States. Separately and together, these seven narratives bring to life the creativity and hard work of social movements, and in doing so reveal how they have been central to American history, in stories that reverberate with todays political activism.

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 4.3.2025
• Zusatzinfo: 24 illustrations
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Klassiker / Moderne Klassiker
• Themenwelt: Geschichte ► Allgemeine Geschichte ► Neuzeit (bis 1918)
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Geschichte ► Regional- / Ländergeschichte
• Themenwelt: Geschichte ► Teilgebiete der Geschichte ► Kulturgeschichte
• Themenwelt: Geschichte ► Teilgebiete der Geschichte ► Sozialgeschichte
• Themenwelt: Sozialwissenschaften ► Ethnologie
• Themenwelt: Sozialwissenschaften ► Politik / Verwaltung ► Staat / Verwaltung
• Themenwelt: Sozialwissenschaften ► Soziologie
• Schlagworte: activism • Combahee • farmworkers union • Fascism • Great Depression • Intersectionality • Ku Klux Klan • Montgomery Bus Boycott • Racial Justice • settlement house movement • townsend movement • trustees of the nation • Unemployment
• ISBN-10: 1-63149-372-8 / 1631493728
• ISBN-13: 978-1-63149-372-0 / 9781631493720