Social movements past and present

The struggle to abolish slavery was a genuine revolution, not merely a reform movement: such is the bold thesis of this interpretive history of the Abolitionist movement by a senior scholar of the black experience in America. Herbert Aptheker shows how the opposition to slavery and racism emerged through the Civil War from the 1820s as a tight organization of "professional revolutionaries," dedicated to nothing less than the confiscation of billions of dollars worth of private property in the form of slaves. These revolutionaries were well aware that by thus destroying the economic basis of ruling class power, they invoked a revolution in the established political, social, and moral order. This fresh appraisal of Abolitionism treats in full the essential role that blacks played in their own liberation. It shows how other social movements of the nineteenth century, among them the labor movement and the push for women's suffrage, found in the struggle against slavery, and throws new light on the parallels between American Abolitionism and the international revolutionary ferment of the age. Drawing on a wealth of primary sources, Aptheker reexamines the parts played by such individuals as Wendell Phillips, Benjamin Lundy, Jefferson Davis, John Brown, Nat Turner, and William Lloyd Garrison in the successes and failures of the Abolitionist movement. -- from dust jacket.

Controversy and Coalition is a comprehensive and engaging overview of the American women's movement from the 1960s to the 1990s. This third edition is the only short and highly readable book on the important developments of the recent women's movement. This edition includes a new introduction by the authors that cover the rise of global feminism.

The past decade has seen a wealth of changes in the gay and lesbian movement and a remarkable growth in gay and lesbian studies. In response to this heightened activity Barry D. Adam has updated his 1987 study of the movement to offer a critical reflection on strategies and objectives that have been developed for the protection and welfare of those who love others of their own sex. This revised volume addresses the movement's recovery of momentum in the wake of New Right campaigns and its gains in human rights and domestic partners' legislation in several countries; the impact of AIDS on movement issues and strategies and the renewal of militant tactics through AIDS activism and Queer Nation; internal debates that continually shift the meanings composing homosexual, gay, lesbian, and queer identities and cultures; the proliferation of new movement groups in Eastern Europe, Latin America, Asia, and Africa; and new developments in historical scholarship that are enriching our understanding of same-sex bonding in the past. Adam delineates the formation of gay and lesbian movements as truly a world phenomenon, exploring their histories in the United States, Great Britain, Germany, France, Canada, Scandinavia, Australia, and countries for which very little information about the activities of gay men and lesbians has been made available. In this global picture of the mobilization of homosexuals Adam identifies the critical factors that have given personal and historical subjectivity to desire, that have shaped the faces and territories of homosexual people, and that have generated homophobia and heterosexism. Treating the sociological aspects of the rise of the gay and lesbian movement, Adam also looks at "new social movements" theory in relation to the gay and lesbian movement and cultural nationalism - whether in the form of cultural feminism or queer nationalism - which he considers an important, perhaps inevitable, moment in the empowerment of inferiorized people.