American Dreamers
How the Left Changed a Nation
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- 11,99 €
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- 11,99 €
Description de l’éditeur
ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: NEWSWEEK/THE DAILY BEAST, THE NEW REPUBLIC, THE PROGRESSIVE
The definitive history of the reformers, radicals, and idealists who fought for a different America, from the abolitionists to Michael Moore and Noam Chomsky.
While the history of the left is a long story of idealism and determination, it has also been a story of movements that failed to gain support from mainstream America. In American Dreamers, Michael Kazin—one of the most respected historians of the American left working today—tells a new history of the movements that, while not fully succeeding on their own terms, nonetheless made lasting contributions to American society. Among these culture shaping events are the fight for equal opportunity for women, racial minorities, and homosexuals; the celebration of sexual pleasure; the inclusion of multiculturalism in the media and school curricula; and the creation of books and films with altruistic and anti-authoritarian messages. Deeply informed, judicious and impassioned, and superbly written, this is an essential book for our times and for anyone seeking to understand our political history and the people who made it.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Feminists, labor militants, civil rights stalwarts, and socialists have captured America s heart though rarely its votes according to this perceptive history of the radical left. Kazin (The Populist Persuasion), editor of Dissent magazine, surveys visionaries, organizers, and rabble-rousers, including abolitionists and free-love communards of the 1830s, Gilded Age utopian novelists and temperance crusaders, feisty Wobblies and avant-garde bohemians, patriotic Popular Front Communists and 60s firebrands. From this tumult of movements and personalities everyone from John Brown to Naomi Klein, Dr. Seuss to Noam Chomsky Kazin discerns continuities: radicals, he contends, succeed by influencing liberals rather than winning power, and by championing individual freedom and self-fulfillment; they fail when they attack religion and nationalism, advocate economic leveling, or advance sectarian purity and Marxist dogmas. Kazin s argument that the socialist economic program was always "stillborn" while the Left s cultural project social equality, identity politics, artistic freedom, sexual liberation, and antiauthoritarianism has triumphed is not new, and it lends the book a tone more of eulogy than of celebration; still this is a lively and lucid synthesis of a vital political tradition. Photos.
