The Radical Reader: A Documentary History of the American Radical Tradition

Description

Radicalism is as American as apple pie. One can scarcely imagine what American society would look like without the abolitionists, feminists, union organizers, civil rights workers, gay and lesbian activists, and environmentalists who have fought to breathe life into the promises of freedom and equality, the lifeblood of American democracy. "The Radical Reader" brings together more than 200 primary documents in a comprehensive anthology of the writings of America's native radical tradition. Spanning the colonial period through the 1990s, the documents have been drawn from a wealth of sources - speeches, manifestos, newspaper editorials, literature, pamphlets, and private letters - representing the work of Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Skidmore, Sojourner Truth, Terence Powderly, Eugene Debs, Marcus Garvey, C. Wright Mills, The Combahee River Collective, Aldo Leopold, Martha Shelley, Stokely Carmichael, and Audre Lorde, along with many others. From Thomas Paine's "Common Sense" to Kate Millett's "Sexual Politics," these documents sparked, guided, and distilled the most influential movements in American history. Brief introductory essays by the editors provide a rich biographical and historical context for each selection.

Timothy Patrick McCarthy is a lecturer on history and literature and on public policy at Harvard University, where he directs the Sexuality, Gender, and Human Rights Program at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy. An award-winning scholar, teacher, and activist, he is a co-editor, with John McMillian, of The Radical Reader: A Documentary History of the American Radical Tradition and of Protest Nation: Words That Inspired a Century of American Radicalism; a co-editor, with John Stauffer, of Prophets of Protest: Reconsidering the History of American Abolitionism; and the editor of The Indispensable Zinn: The Essential Writings of the "People's Historian", all published by The New Press. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. John McMillian is an assistant professor of history at Georgia State University. His articles and review essays have appeared in Radical History Review, Rethinking History, American Quarterly, and elsewhere. He is a co-editor, with Timothy Patrick McCarthy, of The Radical Reader: A Documentary History of the American Radical and Protest Nation: Words That Inspired a Century of American Radicalism (both published by The New Press) and the author of Smoking Typewriters: The Sixties Underground Press and the Rise of Alternative Media in America and Beatles vs. Stones.