Few scholars have achieved the level of recognition and respect among the wider public as Howard Zinn. This should not come as a surprise, given the "unconventional" ways that Zinn embodied and enacted his scholarship. He often took his teaching and writing into those seemingly restricted spaces of popular protest, converting words into…

From the 1920s until 1949, foreign adult educators (mostly women) in the Shanghai YWCA worked to foster labor unrest and build a better world. Many started out as liberal Christians but ended up supporting Chairman Mao. They used street theater, mass singing, games, pageants, structured exercises, and "bible classes," where learners read…

Uses Kenneth Burke's "comic frame" to interpret and assess Gandhi's leadership of the Indian civil rights movement and to maintain the relevance and usefulness of the civil disobedience to other movements. (JD)

Examining the nascent rhetoric of the Young Lords Organization's (YLO) 1969 "garbage offensive," this essay argues that the long-standing constraints on agency to which they were responding demanded an inventive rhetoric that was decolonizing both in its aim and in its form. Blending diverse forms of discourse produced an intersectional rhetoric…

A reporter gives her personal impressions of the Seneca Falls Women's Encampment for a Future of Peace and Justice and the march by members of the encampment to the Seneca Army Depot. Confrontations between the demonstrators and conservative counterdemonstrators and the army response are also covered. (IS)

Author evaluates the radical student movement as a failure. (HS)

In recent decades many people came to know Howard Zinn for his outspoken advocacy on a wide range of progressive causes, including civil rights, free speech, workers' rights, education reform, and opposition to U.S. imperialism. The author's own first encounter with Howard Zinn's special combination of scholarship and activism occurred several…

Analyzes the 1969-71 occupation of Alcatraz Island by young radical American Indians as a set of metaphors for Indian America. Examines the central images of cultural revitalization through independence, protest against the position of Native Americans nationwide and rebellion against White oppression. Contains 47 references. (SV)

Among 141 activists with varying levels of participation in the sanctuary movement, biographical availability factors--younger age and greater discretionary time--best predict high-cost activism (more hours devoted to the movement), whereas ideological socialization factors best predict high-risk activism (direct contact with refugees). Contains…

This essay outlines the course and character of the American student leftist movement during the twentieth century. It summarizes the earlier character of student leftism and describes how the "New Left" developed, its constellation of beliefs, and its tactics and objectives. A principal conclusion is that hard-core student activists…

Henry David Thoreau's stand on civil disobedience is traced, specifically his change of position from 1848 to 1860, and takes issue with the classical statement of Thoreau on the subject, namely, his "Resistance to Civil Government." (RK)