Rethinking the New Left An Interpretative History

From the 1950s to the 1970s, a host of movements struggled to make democracy and equality realities in America. A radical conception of democracy animated the movements for civil rights and black power, for peace and solidarity with the Third World, and for gender and sexual equality. From Vietnam to the war at home against African and Native Americans, Chicanos, Puerto Ricans, and Asian Americans, from Women's to Gay Liberation, the New Left was the broadest-based movement for fundamental change in American history. This book synthesizes and chronicles those protests, confrontations, victories, and defeats over two decades and more. It has a much wider chronological focus than just the decade of the 1960s, and is the most inclusive and broadest ranging analytical synthesis of the New Left yet published.

Van Gosse teaches history at Franklin & Marshall College. He is the author of Where the Boys Are: Cuba, Cold War America and the Making of a New Left.

Why This Is Not Another "Sixties Book" * Defining the New Left * America in the 1950s: "The Best of All Possible Worlds" * The New Left's Origin in the Old Left * The Black Freedom Struggle: From "We Shall Overcome" to "Freedom Now!" * Challenging the Cold War before Vietnam: "Ban the Bomb! Fair Play for Cuba!" * The Northern Student Movement: "Free Speech" and "Participatory Democracy" * Underground Feminists and Homophiles: "The Problems That Have No Name" * Vietnam and "The War at Home" * Black Power: "A Nation within a Nation?" * Red, Brown, and Yellow Power in "Occupied America" * Women's Liberation and Second-Wave Feminism: "The Personal Is Political" * Gay Liberation: "Out of the Closets and into the Streets" * Winning and Losing: The New Left Democratizes America