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101 books match the query 'Social Activists' and 8 start with j

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Jane Addams

Marlene Targ Brill

Ohio University Press, 2024

As part of our Biographies for Young Readers series for middle-grade readers, this book explains who Jane Addams was and why she caused such a stir in the United States and worldwide. The story follows Addams from her first realization of the unfairness that limited the lives, livelihoods, and health of disadvantaged people in the late 1800s to her becoming one of the most beloved—and most disliked—women of her day. She worked to create a more peaceful, fair world for all people, no matter their race, color, nationality, or gender. Along her journey, Addams cofounded Hull-House, the most celebrated settlement house in the United States, and she became a motivating author, speaker, and women’s rights and peace advocate. She worked tirelessly on community, state, and national levels to promote women’s, workers’, and children’s rights, and she spoke passionately against the evils of war. Addams devoted her activities and writings to championing programs for these and other humanitarian causes. Votes for women! Equal rights for African Americans! Good schools and a healthy environment for children! No one—not millionaires, presidents, or the FBI—could stand in the way of her quest for justice. Addams became one of few women worldwide to earn a Nobel Peace Prize. Her efforts to improve social services and communities and to train leaders to carry out this work led to the opening of the first professional school of social work—named in her honor—at the University of Illinois, Chicago. Her writing, teaching, and actions were based on the belief that “without the advance and improvement of the whole, no man can hope for any lasting improvement in his own moral or material individual condition.”

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Jane Fonda

There's a Great Deal to Say

Marilyn S. Greenwald

Rutgers University Press, 0

Since the late 1960s, Jane Fonda has identified as an activist first and an actor second, using her celebrity as a vehicle to convey her views and her advocacy. Few stars of her stature have been as simultaneously acclaimed and vilified as Fonda. Even as she won two Academy Awards and was a major box office draw of the 1970s and 1980s, she received reams of hate mail for her political activism and antiwar stances. This book explores Fonda’s devotion to movement politics—sometimes at the expense of her career and her personal safety.

Digging deep into rare material from cinema archives and Fonda’s own personal papers, journalist Marilyn Greenwald tells the story of how Fonda came to view acting as a “side gig” that gives her a worldwide platform to convey her personal and political views. Charting the evolution of her activism and the merging of her acting and producing with her advocacy, Greenwald focuses on the years from 1968—when she was jarred out of complacency by the Vietnam War—to 1980, after the release of The China Syndrome and the advent of the Three Mile Island nuclear crisis, which brought to light the possible dangers of nuclear energy. Greenwald details how three of her films—Klute (1971), Coming Home (1978), and The China Syndrome (1979)—were designed to further her personal beliefs. She also considers how Fonda has weathered changes in the entertainment industry and public tastes to produce and star in decades' worth of socially conscious projects. Charting Fonda’s personal and professional growth while offering a candid account of her struggles, this book shows how Fonda viewed movies as an influential storytelling tool that can influence public opinion, change minds, and trigger social change.

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Johann Most

Life of a Radical

Tom Goyens

University of Illinois Press, 2025

Known best for articulating the propaganda of the deed, Johann Most was and still is caricatured as a radical fanatic. Tom Goyens’ in-depth biography rediscovers the complexities that animated the German American agitator and made him a pivotal figure in the development of anarchism in the US and socialism in Germany. Most galvanized workers through passionate speeches and writings that showcased his gifts as a performer, satirist, and rhetorician. Numerous challenges, including repeated convictions for his incendiary rhetoric, failed to curb his organizing or his efforts to foster a dedicated network of comrades that included Emma Goldman, Alexander Berkman, and his common-law wife, Helene Minkin. Goyens details Most’s essential contributions to the anarchist movement while also highlighting his critique of religion and defense of science within emancipatory movements. As Goyens follows Most’s ideological journey, he illuminates the political contexts that shaped the anarchist’s evolving views on revolutionary action and social change. Comprehensive and long overdue, Johann Most traces the intellectual life and enduring relevance of a misunderstood radical figure.

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John Brown

A Biography

W. E. B. Du Bois

Westholme Publishing, 2024

In the preface to his biography of John Brown, W. E. B. Du Bois writes that the book “is at once a record of and a tribute to the man who of all Americans has perhaps come nearest to touching the real souls of black folk.” Du Bois alludes to this in Souls of Black Folk when he describes John Brown’s actions: “led by [Charles Lenox] Remond, [William Cooper] Nell, [William] Wells-Brown, and [Frederick] Douglass, a new period of self-assertion and self-development dawned. To be sure, ultimate freedom and assimilation was the ideal before the leaders, but the assertion of the manhood rights of the Negro by himself was the main reliance, and John Brown’s raid was the extreme of its logic.” First published in 1909, the same year Du Bois helped found the NAACP, John Brown is a studious account of the fiery abolitionist’s life, while throughout are asides intertwined in the narrative that provide additional insights into Du Bois’s thoughts on race and America. The life of John Brown carries a message that still resonates in twenty-first century, and Du Bois makes it his refrain throughout this volume: “The cost of liberty is less than the price of repression.”
This edition is introduced by John Brown scholar William S. King, who provides the background to the writing of the biography which took place during a turbulent time of race relations and competing visions from Booker T. Washington and Du Bois for the future of Black Americans. “Du Bois,” King reminds us, “remains one of the best writers on this phase of American history, which is still at our core.”

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John L. Lewis

A Biography

Melvyn Dubofsky and Warren Van Tine

University of Illinois Press, 1986

John L. Lewis (1880-1969), who ruled the United Mine Workers for four decades beginning in 1919, defied presidents, challenged Congress, and kept American political life in an uproar. Drawing upon previously untapped resources in the UMW archives and upon oral histories by major figures of the 1930s and 1940s, the authors have created a remarkable portrait of this 'self-made man' and his times.

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Josie Mpama/Palmer

Get Up and Get Moving

Robert R. Edgar

Ohio University Press, 2020

While African National Congress narratives dominate much of the scholarship on South Africa’s freedom struggle, Josie Mpama/Palmer’s political life offers a different perspective. Highly critical of the patriarchal attitudes that hindered black women from actively participating in politics, Mpama/Palmer was an outspoken advocate for women’s social equality and encouraged black women to become more involved in national conversations. The first black woman to join the Communist Party of South Africa and an antiapartheid activist, Josie Mpama/Palmer remained involved in critical issues all her life, especially protests against Bantu Education and other forms of racial and sexist discrimination. She was an integral figure in establishing the Federation of South African Women, an organization open to women of all races. Mpama/Palmer’s activism and political legacy would become an inspiring example for women in South Africa and around the world to get up and get moving.

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Junctures in Women’s Leadership

Politics

Julie Des Jardins

Rutgers University Press, 2027

This collection profiles women in American politics who have demonstrated true leadership over the past 150 years—though this leadership has not always been recognized as such. These women have defied stereotypical caricatures and modeled effective ways to lead, even when they have not enjoyed formal access to voting or party politics, lost campaigns, or suffered scrutiny and harassment as public figures. Many of them have championed people and causes that their male counterparts have neglected, lending their lived experiences as women to fight for political action for underrepresented groups, and showing time and again that the personal really is political. Here we assess their political careers, not in terms of wins and losses, but rather in their ability to negotiate identity politics and shift conventional rules about how politicians lead.

This collection profiles such varied women as Jeannette Rankin, Shirley Chrisholm, Nancy Pelosi, Kamala Harris, Stacy Abrams, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, among others. Whether they have recast gendered meanings around political ambition, broadened access to the political process, privileged principles over party loyalty, or prioritized issues over incumbency, each woman profiled here has wisdom to impart to new generations of American women who aspire to run for office or be involved in American politics.

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Just and Righteous Causes

Rabbi Ira Sanders and the Fight for Racial and Social Justice in Arkansas, 1926-1963

James L. Moses

University of Arkansas Press, 2018

Winner, 2019 Booker Worthen Prize from the Central Arkansas Library System.

A dedicated advocate for social justice long before the term entered everyday usage, Rabbi Ira Sanders began striving against the Jim Crow system soon after he arrived in Little Rock from New York in 1926. Sanders, who led Little Rock’s Temple B’nai Israel for nearly forty years, was a trained social worker as well as a rabbi and his career as a dynamic religious and community leader in Little Rock spanned the traumas of the Great Depression, World War II and the Holocaust, and the social and racial struggles of the 1950s and 1960s.

Just and Righteous Causes—a full biographical study of this bold social-activist rabbi—examines how Sanders expertly navigated the intersections of race, religion, and gender to advocate for a more just society. It joins a growing body of literature about the lives and histories of Southern rabbis, deftly balancing scholarly and narrative tones to provide a personal look into the complicated position of the Southern rabbi and the Jewish community throughout the political struggles of the twentieth-century South.

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