34 results for "History"

Commies A Journey Through the Old Left, the New Left and the Leftover Left (Large Print 16pt)

Ronald Radosh
Ronald Radosh's earliest memory is of being trundled off to May Day celebrations by his communist parents with a Soviet flag stuck in his baby carriage. Then came education at New York's ''little red schoolhouse.'' Summers at ''commie camp.'' And college at the University of Wisconsin where he became a founding father of the New Left. Commies is a brilliant memoir of growing up in the culture of radicalism. But it also about the hard decisions faced by those professing a radical faith. For Radosh himself, the crisis came when he concluded in his authoritative book on Julius and Ethel Rosenberg that the couple (on whose behalf he had demonstrated as a boy) had indeed been guilty of spying. Attacked as a ''traitor,'' Radosh began to question his political commitments. His disillusionment climaxed in the 1980s when he traveled through Central America as a journalist and historian and ran into his old comrades there still searching for the revolution. One journalist calls Ronald Radosh ''the Zelig of the American Left, seen everywhere and knowing everyone.'' Humorous and tragic, filled with anecdote and personality, Commies is a trip log of his journey, the most intimate look yet at the experience of a radical generation.
ReadHowYouWant.com 2010-06 332 pages

Socialism from Below

Hal Draper
The divisions running through the history of the socialist movement between reformists and revolutionaries, authoritarians and democrats, putschists and gradualists-the divisions and disputes which have provided the categories in terms of which the history of the movement has been written-are secondary. The important distinction is between those socialists who looked for some outside authority which would hand down salvation to the grateful masses from above and those who saw the key to the reform of existing society in the struggle from below for self-emancipation. Behind the question: "What do we mean by socialism?" lies a more important question. What do we mean by democracy?
Center for Socialist History 2002 386 pages

The death and rebirth of American radicalism

Aronowitz, Stanley
The Death and Rebirth of American Radicalism differentiates the ""Social Justice Left"" from ""Cultural Radicalism"" and the various social movements for individual freedom. In The Death and Rebirth of American Radicalism, Stanley Aronowitz asks the question, ""Is there anything left of the Left?"" With the rise of Newt Gingrich and his ""Contract With America,"" how is it that conservativism staged such a remarkable recovery after being discounted in the turbulent 1960s? Aronowitz addresses these and other burning issues of contemporary politics.
Routledge 1996 222 pages

Power And the Idealists: Or, the Passion of Joschka Fischer, And Its Aftermath

Paul Berman
In January 2001, a scandal erupted when a series of photos from 1968 emerged showing German foreign minister Joschka Fischer and a group of leftist street toughs assaulting a cop. Paul Berman, one of the leading essayists and intellectual historians of the New Left, uses this event as a springboard to reflect on a crucial question for Western democracies today: was the violence-tinged radicalism of the 1960s and 1970s a force for social good or for social ill? This wide-ranging history of anti-totalitarianism explores the Left's response to human rights abuses around the world, tracing the intellectual evolution of figures as various as Polish dissident Adam Michnik and Azar Nafisi ("Reading Lolita in Tehran) to argue that liberals willing to use power to protect human rights are the true heirs of the radical sixties, and that the Islamic totalitarian impulse he identified in the "New York Times" bestseller "Terror and Liberalism must be opposed with vigor.
Soft Skull Press 2006-08-10 310 pages