Speaking Out: Activism and Protest in the 1960's and 1970's

Speaking Out :  Activism and Protest in the 1960s and 1970s is a collection of readings about 21 different activist movements that came of age in the 60s and 70s.  Introductions written by recognized scholars who have studied and written about these movements in depth begin each chapter, followed by primary source documents that provide insight into each movement. The chapters not only offer a comprehensive overview of the most important social and political activist groups of these two decades, but they also locate each group’s complex origins, strengths, weaknesses, and legacy. As these authors make clear, ultimately the activist groups of this period each had their share of successes and each made their share of mistakes and miscalculations. Thus, together, they left a most complicated legacy for future generations.

 

Heather Ann Thompson is Associate Professor of History in the Department of African American Studies and Department of History at Temple University . Her first book, Whose Detroit? Politics, Labor and Race in a Modern American City (Cornell University Press, 2001) explored the social and political activism that played out in the streets and workplaces of the Motor City during the tumultuous 1960s and 1970s. Currently she is completing a history of the Attica prison uprising of 1971 and its legacy for Pantheon books.

 

CONTRIBUTORS 

Kathleen C. Berkeley is the director of the Center for Faculty Leadership and a professor of History at UNC Wilmington. Her research and teaching interests focus on issues of race, class, gender, and sexuality in nineteenth and twentieth century America. She is the author of several articles and two books, The Women’s Liberation Movement in America (1999), which won a Choice award and “Like a Plague of Locusts”: From an Antebellum Town to a New South City, Memphis, Tennessee, 1850-1880.  A founding member of the Women’s Studies Minor and the Women’s Resource Center, she has twice served as interim director of the Women’s Resources Center. Berkeley has also served on the board of the Domestic Violence Shelter and Services of the Lower Cape Fear and is currently serves on board of the North Carolina Humanities Council. 

 

Jane Dailey is an Associate Professor of history at the University of Chicago. She is a historian of the nineteenth and twentieth century United States, with an emphasis on the American South. Dailey’s first book, Before Jim Crow: The Politics of Race in Postemancipation Virginia (University of North Carolina Press, 2000), analyzed the conditions that facilitated and, ultimately, undid interracial politics in the postwar South. An edited collection, Jumpin' Jim Crow: Southern Politics from Civil War to Civil Rights (Princeton University Press, 2000), continued the theme of African American resistance to white domination from Reconstruction through the 1950s. Her current project is a book on race, sex and the civil rights movement from emancipation to the present.

 

Matt Garcia is Associate Professor of American Civilization, Ethnic Studies and History at Brown University.  His book, A World of Its Own:  Race, Labor and Citrus in the Making of Greater Los Angeles, 1900-1970 (The University of North Carolina Press, 2001) was named co-winner for the best book in oral history by the Oral History Association in 2003.  His current book project, Nature’s Candy:  Labor, Protest and Grapes in the California-Mexican Borderlands, explores grape cultivation and the formation of the Farmworkers Movement during the second half of the twentieth century. 

 

Kenneth J. Heineman is a professor of history at Ohio University-Lancaster and the author of four books. These include Campus Wars: The Peace Movement at American State Universities in the Vietnam Era,  God is a Conservative: Religion, Politics, and Morality in Contemporary America, A Catholic New Deal: Religion and Reform in Depression Pittsburgh, and  Put Your Bodies Upon The Wheels: Student Revolt in the 1960s. In 2004 Heineman received the Ohio University Regional Higher Education Outstanding Professor Award, and was honored by the Ohio House of Representatives for his contributions to teaching, community service, and scholarship.  In addition he served as an evaluator for the U.S. Department of Education’s Teaching American History Grant program

 

 

Troy Johnson is a Professor of American Indian Studies and U.S. History at California State University, Long Beach. He is the author, editor, or associate editor of fifteen books and numerous scholarly journal articles. His publications include Distinguished Native American Spiritual Practitioners and Healers, The Occupation of Alcatraz Island, Indian Self-determination and The Rise of Indian Activism and American Indian Activism, Alcatraz to The Longest Walk. His areas of expertise also include American Indian activism, Federal Indian Law, Indian Child Welfare and Indian Youth Suicide.  Dr. Johnson’s historical documentary of the American Indian Occupation of Alcatraz Island 1969-1971 was awarded first place honors at the 26th American Indian Film Festival and was screened at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2001.

 

Felicia Kornbluh is Associate Professor in Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Vermont and is the author of The Battle for Welfare Rights: Politics and Poverty in Modern America (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007).  courses that emphasize the history of the 1960s and the 1980s, public policy history, women’s history, and the history of social welfare. She has written for many publications, including The Nation, Feminist Studies, The Women’s Review of Books, Los Angeles Times op-ed page, and Journal of American History.  She co-founded Historians for Social Justice and is a long-time member of the feminist advocacy group the Women’s Committee of 100. Kornbluh holds a Ph.D. in history from Princeton University and a B.A. from Harvard-Radcliffe.

 

Paul K. Longmore, Professor of History at San Francisco State University,
specializes in Early American history and the history of people with
disabilities.  He is the author of The Invention of George Washington (1988;
1998) and Why I Burned My Book and Other Essays on Disability (2003). With
Lauri Umansky, he co-edited The New Disability History: American Perspectives
(2001), an anthology of essays, and is co-editing a book series, The History
of Disability. 

 

Daryl J. Maeda is an assistant professor of Ethnic Studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder.  He is currently completing a book, Asian American Cultural Formation (forthcoming from University of Minnesota Press) that examines the formation of Asian American racial identity from the 1930s to the 1970s.  His next project comparatively examines the emergence of radical social movements by people of color in the U.S. during the 1960s and 70s.

 

Joseph A. McCartin is associate professor of History at Georgetown University.  He is the author of Labor’s Great War The Struggle for Industrial Democracy and the Origins of Modern American Labor Relations, 1912-21 (Chapel Hill: University of North Caroline Press, 1997). McCartin also edited a new edition of Melvyn Dubofsky’s We Shall Be All: A History of the Industrial Workers of the World, and co-edited American Labor: A Documentary History (New York: Palgrave, 2004) with Melvyn Dubofsky. In 2006 McCartin co-edited Americanism: New Perspectives on the History of an Ideal with Michael Kazin. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006).

 

Heather McCarty is an activist, teacher, and scholar currently working as an assistant professor at Ohlone College.  She received her PhD in U.S. history from the University of California at Berkeley, and while a graduate student there, she taught in the college program at San Quentin State Prison. She is currently working on a history of prisoner social relations in California prisons.

 

Angela G. Mertig has a Ph.D. in Sociology (Washington State University, 1995) and is currently an Associate Professor of Sociology in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Middle Tennessee State University in Murfreesboro, Tennessee.  She specializes in studying the environmental movement and public opinion, attitudes and behavior regarding the natural environment, wildlife, land use, and related issues. Mertig’s scholarly publications can be found in numerous journals including Applied Environmental Education and Communication, Population and Environment and Social Science Quarterl.

 

Rusty Monhollon is Associate Professor of History and Director for the Masters of Arts in Humanities program at Hood College in Frederick, Maryland, where he teaches courses in United States, African-American, and women’s history. His book “This is America?” The Sixties in Lawrence, Kansas (Palgrave, 2002), received the Edward H. Tihen Publication Award from the Kansas State Historical Association.

 

Susan Pearson is an Assistant Professor of History at Northwestern University.  She is currently completing a book, entitled Rights of the Defenseless: Animals, Children, and Sentimental Liberalism in Nineteenth-Century America, which examines the links between animal and child protection organizations.  She has also published articles about changes in the concept of cruelty and the problem of writing animals into history.

 

Wendell Pritchett is Professor of Law and Associate Dean for Academic Affairs at the University of Pennsylvania, where he teaches property, local government law, urban policy, and legal history.  Professor Pritchett received his J.D. from Yale Law School (1991) and his Ph.D. in American History from the University of Pennsylvania (1997).  His first book, Brownsville, Brooklyn: Blacks, Jews and the Changing Face of the Ghetto (University of Chicago Press, 2002), explores race relations and public policy in 20th century Brooklyn.  He is currently writing a biography of Robert Weaver, the first Secretary of Housing and Urban Development.

 

James Ralph is a professor of history at Middlebury College.  Ralph’s research interests include post-war America, Race Relations in modern America, the American civil rights movement, and modern urban America. He is the author of Northern Protest: Martin Luther King, Jr., Chicago, and the Civil Rights Movement.  He is currently at work on a study of the pursuit of racial equality in Peoria, Illinois.

 

Craig A. Rimmerman is Professor of Public Policy Studies and Political Science and currently holds the Joseph P. DiGangi Endowed Chair in the Social Sciences at Hobart and William Smith Colleges. Rimmerman is the author, editor, and co-editor of a number of books, including The Politics of Gay Rights (co-edited with Kenneth Wald and Clyde Wilcox, 2000),  From Identity to Politics:  The Lesbian and Gay Movements in the United States (2002) and The New Citizenship:  Unconventional Politics, Activism and Service (3rd edition, 2005).  He is also a former American Political Science Association Congressional Fellow. Rimmerman is currently working on a book that examines the contemporary lesbian and gay movements’ political organizing strategy in light of 3 key policy areas:  HIV/AIDS, military integration, and same-sex marriage.

 

Jürgen Ruckaberle is an international student from Germany with a Staatsexamen degree from the University of Tübingen and an MA in History from the University of Oregon. He currently is working on a dissertation at the University of Oregon that explores the political mobilization of consumers; charting the achievements, limits, and legacies of the consumer activism in the 1960s and 1970s and shedding shed light on consumer activists and their response to other forms of activism in this period.

 

Gregory L. Schneider is Associate Professor of History at Emporia State University in Kansas. He is the author of Cadres for Conservatism: Young Americans for Freedom and the Rise of the Contemporary Right (NYU Press, 1999) and editor of Conservatism in America since 1930: A Reader (NYU Press, 2003) and Equality, Decadence and Modernity: The Collected Essays of Stephen J. Tonsor (ISI Books, 2005).

 

William L. Van Deburg is Evjue-Bascom Professor of Afro-American Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.  His publications on Black Power era cultural history include New Day in Babylon (1992),  Black Camelot (1997), and Hoodlums (2004) as well as two collections of   documents, Modern Black Nationalism  (1997) and African-American Nationalism (2005).

 

Carmen Teresa Whalen is Professor of History and Chair of the Latina/o Studies Program at Williams College. She is the author of From Puerto Rico to Philadelphia: Puerto Rican Workers and Postwar Economies and of El Viaje: Puerto Ricans of Philadelphia, a photographic history. Concerned with Puerto Rican communities throughout the United States, she is also co-editor and contributor to The Puerto Rican Diaspora: Historical Perspectives. Her current research explores Puerto Rican women, the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union, and New York City’s garment industry.

 

LawrenceS. Wittner, Professor of History at the State University of New York/Albany, has written or edited ten books and authored over a hundred articles, mostly on peace and foreign policy issues.  They include the award-winning scholarly trilogy, The Struggle Against the Bomb (Stanford University Press)―One World or None, 1993, Resisting the Bomb, 1997, and Toward Nuclear Abolition, 2003―and Peace Action:  Past, Present, and Future (Paradigm Publishers, 2007).