A magisterial, riveting movement history of Los Angeles in the Sixties. Los Angeles in the sixties was a hotbed of political and social upheaval. The city was a launchpad for Black Power where Malcolm X and Angela Davis first came to prominence and the Watts uprising shook the nation. The city was home to the Chicano Blowouts and Chicano Moratorium, as well as being the birthplace of Asian American as a political identity. It was a locus of the antiwar movement, gay liberation movement, and womens movement, and, of course, the capital of California counterculture. Mike Davis and Jon Wiener provide the first comprehensive movement history of L.A. in the sixties, drawing on extensive archival research and dozens of interviews with principal figures, as well as the authors storied personal histories as activists. Following on from Davis's award winning L.A. history, City of Quartz, Set the Night on Fire is a historical tour de force, delivered in scintillating and fiercely beautiful prose.

When FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover reported to the Nixon White House in 1972 about the Bureau's surveillance of John Lennon, he began by explaining that Lennon was a "former member of the Beatles singing group." When a copy of this letter arrived in response to Jon Wiener's 1981 Freedom of Information request, the entire text was withheld—along with almost 200 other pages—on the grounds that releasing it would endanger national security. This book tells the story of the author's remarkable fourteen-year court battle to win release of the Lennon files under the Freedom of Information Act in a case that went all the way to the Supreme Court. With the publication of Gimme Some Truth , 100 key pages of the Lennon FBI file are available—complete and unexpurgated, fully annotated and presented in a "before and after" format. Lennon's file was compiled in 1972, when the war in Vietnam was at its peak, when Nixon was facing reelection, and when the "clever Beatle" was living in New York and joining up with the New Left and the anti-war movement. The Nixon administration's efforts to "neutralize" Lennon are the subject of Lennon's file. The documents are reproduced in facsimile so that readers can see all the classification stamps, marginal notes, blacked out passages and—in some cases—the initials of J. Edgar Hoover. The file includes lengthy reports by confidential informants detailing the daily lives of anti-war activists, memos to the White House, transcripts of TV shows on which Lennon appeared, and a proposal that Lennon be arrested by local police on drug charges. Fascinating, engrossing, at points hilarious and absurd, Gimme Some Truth documents an era when rock music seemed to have real political force and when youth culture challenged the status quo in Washington. It also delineates the ways the Reagan, Bush, and Clinton administrations fought to preserve government secrecy, and highlights the legal strategies adopted by those who have challenged it.

Hours after the USSR collapsed in 1991, the U.S. Congress began making plans to establish the official memory of the Cold War. Conservatives dominated the proceedings, spending millions of dollars to portray the conflict as a clash of good vs. evil, ending in a defeat of totalitarianism equal in significance to the outcome of World War II. In this book, the author visits Cold War monuments, museums, and memorials across the United States to find out how the era is remembered today. His journey provides a history of the Cold War that turns many conventional notions on their heads

Available for the first time in paperback after being widely reviewed and discussed upon its hardcover publication, Historians in Trouble is investigative journalist and historian Jon Wiener's "incisive and entertaining" ( New Statesman ) account of several of the most notorious history scandals of the last few years. Focusing on a dozen key controversies ranging across the political spectrum and representing a wide array of charges, Wiener seeks to understand why some cases make the headlines and end careers, while others do not. He looks at the well publicized cases of Michael Bellesiles, the historian of gun culture accused of research fraud; accused plagiarists and "celebrity historians" Stephen Ambrose and Doris Kearns Goodwin; Pulitzer Prize winner Joseph J. Ellis, who lied in his classroom at Mount Holyoke about having fought in Vietnam; and the allegations of misconduct by Harvard's Stephan Thernstrom and Emory's Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, who nevertheless were appointed by George W. Bush to the National Council on the Humanities. As the Bancroft Prize-winning historian Linda Gordon wrote in Dissent, Wiener's "very readable book . . . reveal[s] not only scholarly misdeeds but also recent increases in threats to free debate and intellectual integrity."

“It is frightening to think the [Jon Wiener] teaches history at a university ... ”—Jacques Derrida “Wiener takes the modern university as his beat, and covers it like a police reporter ... Wiener’s mean streets are the think tank, the scholarly symposium, and the faculty lounge. And when he’s had enough of this academic low life, he listens to Elvis, Springsteen and the Beatles. He even listens to Frank Sinatra.”—John Leonard “In this book, Jon Wiener demonstrates his great skill as guerrilla sharpshooter in the forty-year war that the National Security State has been conducting against the American people. These reports from the field—the resistance—illuminate Nixon and Watergate as never before, reveal in fascinating detail the turbulence within Academe, invoke pity if not awe for that unexpected victim of state, Frank Sinatra.”—Gore Vidal “Wiener is good at spotting, and blasting, paranoid fantasy and incompetence in high (and low) places and his range of targets is impressively wide ... [his] surveys are lucid, trenchant and brief.”— Observer