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27 books match the query 'Peace movements'
A Call to Conscience
The Anti-Contra War CampaignRoger Peace
University of Massachusetts Press, 2012
Unlike earlier U.S. interventions in Latin America, the Reagan administration's attempt to overthrow the Sandinista government of Nicaragua during the 1980s was not allowed to proceed quietly. Tens of thousands of American citizens organized and agitated against U.S. aid to the counterrevolutionary guerrillas, known as “contras.” Believing the Contra War to be unnecessary, immoral, and illegal, they challenged the administration's Cold War stereotypes, warned of “another Vietnam,” and called on the United States to abide by international norms.
A Call to Conscience offers the first comprehensive history of the anti–Contra War campaign and its Nicaragua connections. Roger Peace places this eight-year campaign in the context of previous American interventions in Latin America, the Cold War, and other grassroots oppositional movements. Based on interviews with American and Nicaraguan citizens and leaders, archival records of activist organizations, and official government documents, this book reveals activist motivations, analyzes the organizational dynamics of the anti–Contra War campaign, and contrasts perceptions of the campaign in Managua and Washington.
Peace shows how a variety of civic groups and networks—religious, leftist, peace, veteran, labor, women's rights—worked together in a decentralized campaign that involved extensive transnational cooperation.
Beyond Vietnam
The Politics of Protest in Massachusetts, 1974-1990Robert Surbrug
University of Massachusetts Press, 2009
Narratives of the 1960s typically describe an ascending arc of political activism that peaked in 1968, then began a precipitous descent as the revolutionary dreams of the New Left failed to come to fruition. The May 1970 killings at Kent State often stand as an epitaph to a decade of protest, after which the principal story becomes the resurgence of the right.
In Beyond Vietnam: The Politics of Protest in Massachusetts, 1974–1990, Robert Surbrug challenges this prevailing paradigm by examining three protest movements that were direct descendants of Vietnam-era activism: the movement against nuclear energy; the nuclear weapons freeze movement; and the Central American solidarity movement. Drawing lessons from the successes and failures of the preceding era, these movements had a significant impact on the liberal wing of the Democratic Party, which itself had been undergoing major transformations in the wake of the 1960s.
By focusing on one state—Massachusetts—Surbrug is able to illuminate the interaction between the activist left and mainstream liberalism, showing how each influenced the other and how together they helped shape the politics of the 1970s and 1980s. During these years, Massachusetts emerged as a center of opposition to nuclear power, the continuing Cold War arms race, and Ronald Reagan's interventionist policies in Central America. The state's role in national policy was greatly enhanced by prominent political figures such as Senator Edward Kennedy, Speaker of the House Thomas “Tip” O'Neill, presidential candidate Governor Michael Dukakis, Vietnam veteran Senator John Kerry, and moderate Republican Silvio Conte.
What Beyond Vietnam shows is that the rise of the right in the aftermath of the 1960s was by no means a unilateral ascendancy. Instead it involved a bifurcation of American politics in which an increasingly strong conservative movement was vigorously contested by an activist left and a reinvigorated mainstream liberalism.
Cold War Progressives
Women's Interracial Organizing for Peace and FreedomJacqueline Castledine
University of Illinois Press, 2012
Cornerstones of Peace
Jewish Identity Politics and Democratic TheoryBrettschneider, Marla
Rutgers University Press, 1996
Throughout the seventies, the idea of being “pro-Israel” was traditionally equated with support for the Israeli government and was central to an understanding of American Jewish identity. It was so central, argues Marla Brettschneider, that even committed activists who took issue with such a monolithic stance were silenced by mainstream Jewish organizations. But during the 1980s, a change took place. An explosion of new Jewish groups intent on challenging the dominant definition of the pro-Israel attitude transformed an increasingly closed Jewish community into one more democratic and inclusive.
In Cornerstones of Peace, Marla Brettschneider skillfully combines a lucid review of contemporary Liberal political theory and its understanding of the role of groups in the political process, a sophisticated analysis of Hobbesian philosophy, and a rich history of “alternative” Jewish activist groups like Breira and Americans for Peace Now (APN) to ask: What can we learn about identity and democratic theory from the changes that have taken place in the Jewish community? Through an insightful exploration of how small, activist groups have reclaimed pro-Israel identity politics as a collective multilayered process, Brettschneider adds her voice to the growing number of political theorists envisioning a pro-diversity alternative to Liberal political thought. She theorizes about a new democratic theory, showing theorists and activists how to envision and enact more vibrant, inclusive democratic politics.
Dark Hope
Working for Peace in Israel and PalestineDavid Shulman
University of Chicago Press, 2007
For decades, we’ve been shocked by images of violent clashes between Israelis and Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. But for all their power, those images leave us at a loss: from our vantage at home, it’s hard for us to imagine the struggles of those living in the midst of the fighting. Now, American-born Israeli David Shulman takes us right into the heart of the conflict with Dark Hope, an eye-opening chronicle of his work as a member of the peace group Ta‘ayush, which takes its name from the Arabic for “living together.”
Though Shulman never denies the complexity of the issues fueling the conflict—nor the culpability of people on both sides—he forcefully clarifies the injustices perpetrated by Israel by showing us the human dimension of the occupation. Here we meet Palestinians whose houses have been blown up by the Israeli army, shepherds whose sheep have been poisoned by settlers, farmers stripped of their land by Israel’s dividing wall. We watch as whip-swinging police on horseback attack crowds of nonviolent demonstrators, as Israeli settlers shoot innocent Palestinians harvesting olives, and as families and communities become utterly destroyed by the unrelenting violence of the occupation.
Opposing such injustices, Shulman and his companions—Israeli and Palestinian both—doggedly work through checkpoints to bring aid, rebuild houses, and physically block the progress of the dividing wall. As they face off against police, soldiers, and hostile Israeli settlers, anger mixes with compassion, moments of kinship alternate with confrontation, and, throughout, Shulman wrestles with his duty to fight the cruelty enabled by “that dependable and devastating human failure to feel.”
With Dark Hope, Shulman has written a book of deep moral searching, an attempt to discover how his beloved Israel went wrong—and how, through acts of compassionate disobedience, it might still be brought back.
Freedom and Despair
Notes from the South Hebron HillsDavid Shulman
University of Chicago Press, 2018
David Shulman knows intimately what it takes to live your beliefs, to return, day after day, to the struggle, despite knowing you are often more likely to lose than win. Interweaving powerful stories and deep meditations, Freedom and Despair offers vivid firsthand reports from the occupied West Bank in Palestine as seen through the eyes of an experienced Israeli peace activist who has seen the Israeli occupation close up as it impacts on the lives of all Palestinian civilians.
Alongside a handful of beautifully written and often shocking tales from the field, Shulman meditates deeply on how to understand the evils around him, what it means to persevere as an activist decade after decade, and what it truly means to be free. The violent realities of the occupation are on full display. We get to know and understand the Palestinian shepherds and farmers and Israeli volunteers who face this situation head-on with nonviolent resistance. Shulman does not hold back on acknowledging the daily struggles that often leave him and his fellow activists full of despair. Inspired by these committed individuals who are not prepared to be silent or passive, Shulman suggests a model for ordinary people everywhere. Anyone prepared to take a risk and fight their oppressive political systems, he argues, can make a difference—if they strive to act with compassion and to keep hope alive.
This is the moving story of a man who continues to fight for good in the midst of despair. An indispensable book in our era of reactionary politics and refugee crises, political violence and ecological devastation, Freedom and Despair is a gripping memoir of struggle, activism, and hope for peace.
From Revolutionaries to Citizens
Antimilitarism in France, 1870–1914Paul B. Miller
Duke University Press, 2002
Although more general accounts of the Left’s “failure” to halt international war in August 1914 focus on its lack of unity or the decline of trade unionism, Miller contends that these explanations barely scratch the surface when it comes to interpreting the Left’s overwhelming acceptance of the war. By embedding his cultural analysis of antimilitarist propaganda into the larger political and diplomatic history of prewar Europe, he reveals the Left’s seemingly sudden transformation “from revolutionaries to citizens” as less a failure of resolve than a confession of commonality with the broader ideals of republican France. Examining sources ranging from police files and court records to German and British foreign office memos, Miller emphasizes the success of antimilitarism as a rallying cry against social and political inequities on behalf of ordinary citizens. Despite their keen awareness of the bloodletting that awaited Europe, he claims, antimilitarists ultimately accepted the war with Germany for the same reason they had pursued their own struggle within France: to address injustices and defend the rights of citizens in a democratic society.
Guys Like Me
Five Wars, Five Veterans for PeaceMessner, Michael A
Rutgers University Press, 2019
Guys Like Me introduces us to five ordinary men who have done extraordinary work as peace activists: World War II veteran Ernie Sanchez, Korean War veteran Woody Powell, Vietnam veteran Gregory Ross, Gulf War veteran Daniel Craig, and Operation Iraqi Freedom veteran Jonathan Hutto. Acclaimed sociologist Michael Messner offers rich profiles of each man, recounting what led him to join the armed forces, what he experienced when fighting overseas, and the guilt and trauma he experienced upon returning home. He reveals how the pain and horror of the battlefront motivated these onetime warriors to reconcile with former enemies, get involved as political activists, and help younger generations of soldiers.
Guys Like Me is an inspiring multigenerational saga of men who were physically or psychically wounded by war, but are committed to healing themselves and others, forging a path to justice, and replacing endless war with lasting peace
Our Grief Is Not a Cry for War
The Movement to Stop the War on TerrorJeremy Varon
University of Chicago Press, 2025
Just after 9/11, President George W. Bush climbed the rubble where the World Trade Center had stood. Surrounded by shouts of anger, he said, “The people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon!” With these words, Bush ushered in the War on Terror. Quickly, a global protest movement mobilized against it, reshaping the political, moral, and media landscape.
Jeremy Varon’s Our Grief Is Not a Cry for War is the definitive history of that movement. Millions of Americans participated in thousands of acts of protest, from demonstrations to civil disobedience to peace encampments in Iraq. On February 15, 2003, up to 30 million people worldwide took to the streets in the largest protest in human history. But this enormous outcry was not enough to stop the US invasion of Iraq. Varon explores the limits to the movement’s power but also shows how it worked to make opposition to the Iraq War a part of public debate, hastening its end and limiting the broader War on Terror. In the book, you’ll meet the families of the 9/11 victims, Iraq War veterans, and Gold Star families who spoke out against war.
Written with a lively and revelatory voice, Our Grief Is Not a Cry for War illuminates the passion of the peace movement, the mark it made, and the enduring legacies of the War on Terror.
Our Sisters' Promised Land
Women, Politics, and Israeli-Palestinian CoexistenceAyala Emmett
University of Michigan Press, 2003
Paradoxes of Peace
German Peace Movements Since 1945Alice Holmes Cooper
University of Michigan Press, 1996
Plan Colombia
U.S. Ally Atrocities and Community ActivismJohn Lindsay-Poland
Duke University Press, 2018
Presidents and Protestors
Political Rhetoric in the 1960sTheodore O. Windt
University of Alabama Press, 1990
The decade of the 1960s was a time of passionate politics and resounding rhetoric. The “resounding rhetoric,” from Kennedy’s celebrated inaugural address, to the outlandish antics of the Yippies, is the focus of this book. The importance of this volume is its consideration of both people in power (presidents) and people out of power (protesters), and its delineation of the different rhetorical bases that each had to work from in participating in the politics of the 1960s.
Presidents and Protesters places rhetorical acts within their specific political contexts, changing the direction of previous rhetorical studies from the sociological to the historical-political. Above all, this is an intellectual history of the 1960s as seen through the rhetoric of the participants, which ultimately shows that the major participants utilized every form of political discourse available and, consequently, exhausted not only themselves but the rhetorical forms as well.
Rebels Against War
The American Peace Movement, 1933-1983Lawrence Wittner
Temple University Press, 1984
Resisting Reagan
The U.S. Central America Peace MovementChristian Smith
University of Chicago Press, 1996
Focusing on the movement's three most important national campaigns—Witness for Peace, Sanctuary, and the Pledge of Resistance—this book demonstrates the centrality of morality as a political motivator, highlights the importance of political opportunities in movement outcomes, and examines the social structuring of insurgent consciousness. Based on extensive surveys, interviews, and research, Resisting Reagan makes significant contributions to our understanding of the formation of individual activist identities, of national movement dynamics, and of religious resources for political activism.
The Peace Script
Framing Violence in US Anti-War DissentDominic J. Manthey
University of Alabama Press, 2025
Exposes how appeals to civility, harmony, and nonaggression can unwittingly underpin exclusionary assumptions about race, gender, and class
Offering an innovative critique of peace rhetoric throughout US history, The Peace Script: Framing Violence in US Anti-War Dissent reexamines the language of dissent with lessons for our era defined by digital activism and fierce political debates. Dominic J. Manthey explores the peace arguments of various movements, including the Copperhead Movement during the Civil War, the Anti-Imperialist League’s stance against US colonialism, Henry Ford's Peace Ship expedition during World War I, the Mothers’ Movement during World War II, and the Vietnam Veterans against the War. Each chapter reveals how these movements, while advocating for peace, often upheld or encouraged racial, gender, and class inequalities.
Manthey navigates the complex terrain of grassroots activism by blending rhetorical criticism and historical insight to tell readers about the “peace script” that has echoed across America’s many wars. Through archival materials and case studies, The Peace Script reveals how anti-war movements craft compelling narratives that dramatize society through heroes, antagonists, and transformative ideals.
Redefining the struggle for peace as not only a fight against warfare but also a battle over space, identity, and the right to live with dignity, The Peace Script is essential for scholars of history, rhetoric, and social justice. Manthey provides a crucial perspective on the intersection of race, memory and power, offering urgent insights into how these legacies continue to shape society today.
The Selected Papers of Jane Addams
Vol. 2: Venturing into UsefulnessEdited by Mary Lynn McCree Bryan, Barbara Bair, and Maree de Angury; with the assistance of Elizabeth Stevens, Stewart Burns, and Ellen Skerrett
University of Illinois Press, 2009
Artfully annotated, The Selected Papers of Jane Addams offers an evocative choice of correspondence, photographs, and other primary documents, presenting a multi-layered narrative of Addams's personal and emerging professional life. Themes inaugurated in the previous volume are expanded here, including dilemmas of family relations and gender roles; the history of education; the dynamics of female friendship; religious belief and ethical development; changes in opportunities for women; and the evolution of philanthropy, social welfare, and reform ideas.
The Selected Papers of Jane Addams
Vol. 3: Creating Hull-House and an International Presence, 1889-1900Jane Addams Edited by Mary Lynn McCree Bryan, Maree de Angury, and Ellen Skerrett: with the assistance of Richard R. Seidel,
University of Illinois Press, 2019
The third volume in this acclaimed series documents Addams’s creation of Hull-House and her rise to worldwide fame as the acknowledged female leader of progressive reform. It also provides evidence of her growing commitment to pacifism. Here we see Addams, a force of thought, action, and commitment, forming lasting relationships with her Hull-House neighbors and the Chicago community of civic, political, and social leaders, even as she matured as an organizer, leader, and fund-raiser, and as a sought-after speaker, and writer. The papers reveal her positions on reform challenges while illuminating her strategies, successes, and responses to failures. At the same time, the collection brings to light Addams’s private life. Letters and other documents trace how many of her Hull-House and reform alliances evolved into deep, lasting friendships and also explore the challenges she faced as her role in her own family life became more complex.
Fully annotated and packed with illustrations, The Selected Papers of Jane Addams, Volume 3 is a portrait of a woman as she changed—and as she changed history.
The Selected Papers of Jane Addams
vol. 1: Preparing to Lead, 1860-81Edited by Mary Lynn McCree Bryan, Barbara Bair, and Maree de Angury
University of Illinois Press, 2002
The World Says No to War
Demonstrations against the War on IraqStefaan Walgrave
University of Minnesota Press, 2010
Un-American
W.E.B. Du Bois and the Century of World RevolutionBill V Mullen
Temple University Press, 2015
Un-American is Bill Mullen’s revisionist account of renowned author and activist W.E.B. Du Bois’s political thought toward the end of his life, a period largely dismissed and neglected by scholars. He describes Du Bois’s support for what the Communist International called “world revolution” as the primary objective of this aged radical’s activism. Du Bois was a champion of the world’s laboring millions and critic of the Cold War, a man dedicated to animating global political revolution.
Mullen argues that Du Bois believed that the Cold War stalemate could create the conditions in which the world powers could achieve not only peace but workers’ democracy. Un-American shows Du Bois to be deeply engaged in international networks and personal relationships with revolutionaries in India, China, and Africa. Mullen explores how thinkers like Karl Marx, Jawaharlal Nehru, Mohandas Gandhi, and C.L.R. James helped him develop a theory of world revolution at a stage in his life when most commentators regard him as marginalized. This original political biography also challenges assessments of Du Bois as an American “race man.”
Unsafe for Democracy
World War I and the U.S. Justice Department's Covert Campaign to Suppress DissentWilliam H. Thomas Jr.
University of Wisconsin Press, 2009
“Recommended for all libraries.”—Frederic Krome, Library Journal
War Is Not a Game
The New Antiwar Soldiers and the Movement They BuiltLevinson, Nan
Rutgers University Press, 2016
We Begin Bombing in Five Minutes
Late Cold War Culture in the Age of ReaganAndrew Hunt
University of Massachusetts Press, 2021
We Begin Bombing in Five Minutes focuses on a striking array of protest movements that took up issues such as the nuclear arms race, U.S. intervention in Central America, and American investments in South Africa. Hunt's new history of the eighties investigates how film, television, and other facets of popular culture critiqued Washington's Cold War policies and reveals that activists and cultural rebels alike posed a more meaningful challenge to the Cold War's excesses than their predecessors in the McCarthy era.
When Peace Is Not Enough
How the Israeli Peace Camp Thinks about Religion, Nationalism, and JusticeAtalia Omer
University of Chicago Press, 2013
Women Strike for Peace
Traditional Motherhood and Radical Politics in the 1960sAmy Swerdlow
University of Chicago Press, 1993
Women Strike for Peace began on November 1, 1961, when thousands of white, middle-class women walked out of their kitchens and off their jobs in a one-day protest against Soviet and American nuclear policies. The protest led to a national organization of women who fought against nuclear arms and U.S. intervention in Vietnam. While maintaining traditional maternal and feminine roles, members of WSP effectively challenged national policies—defeating a proposal for a NATO nuclear fleet, withstanding an investigation by the House Committee on Un-American Activities, and sending one of its leaders to Congress as a peace candidate.
As a study of a dissident group grounded in prescribed female culture, and the struggle of its members to avoid being trapped within that culture, this book adds a crucial new dimension to women's studies. In addition, this account of WSP's success as a grass roots, nonhierarchical movement will be of great interest to historians, political scientists, and anyone interested in peace studies or conflict resolution.
"Swerdlow has re-created a unique piece of American political history, a chapter of the international peace movement, and an origin of the modern feminist movement. No historian, activist, or self-respecting woman should be without Women Strike for Peace. It shows not only how one group of women created change, but also how they inevitably changed themselves."—Gloria Steinem
Writing against War
Literature, Activism, and the British Peace MovementCharles Andrews
Northwestern University Press, 2017
The cataclysm of the First World War gave rise to the British Peace Movement, a spectrum of pacifist, internationalist, and antiwar organizations and individuals. Antiwar sentiments found expression not only in editorials, criticism, and journalism but also in novels and other works of literature. Writing against War examines the work of Aldous Huxley, Storm Jameson, Siegfried Sassoon, Rose Macaulay, and Virginia Woolf to analyze the effects of their attempts to employ fiction in the service of peace activism. It further traces how Huxley, Woolf, and others sought to reconcile their antiwar beliefs with implacable military violence.
The British Peace Movement's failure to halt the rise of fascism and the Second World War continues to cast a shadow over contemporary pacifist movements. Writing about War will fascinate scholars of peace studies and literature and offers valuable insights for current-day peace activists and artists who seek to integrate creativity with activism.