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4 books match the query 'Social Protest'
EC Comics
Race, Shock, and Social ProtestQiana Whitted
Rutgers University Press, 2019
Entertaining Comics Group (EC Comics) is perhaps best-known today for lurid horror comics like Tales from the Crypt and for a publication that long outlived the company’s other titles, Mad magazine. But during its heyday in the early 1950s, EC was also an early innovator in another genre of comics: the so-called “preachies,” socially conscious stories that boldly challenged the conservatism and conformity of Eisenhower-era America.
EC Comics examines a selection of these works—sensationally-titled comics such as “Hate!,” “The Guilty!,” and “Judgment Day!”—and explores how they grappled with the civil rights struggle, antisemitism, and other forms of prejudice in America. Putting these socially aware stories into conversation with EC’s better-known horror stories, Qiana Whitted discovers surprising similarities between their narrative, aesthetic, and marketing strategies. She also recounts the controversy that these stories inspired and the central role they played in congressional hearings about offensive content in comics.
The first serious critical study of EC’s social issues comics, this book will give readers a greater appreciation of their legacy. They not only served to inspire future comics creators, but also introduced a generation of young readers to provocative ideas and progressive ideals that pointed the way to a better America.
Imagining Health
Medicine, Social Protest, and Modern American LiteratureIra Halpern
University of Massachusetts Press, 2026
In the United States, a deep suspicion of professional medical expertise is becoming increasingly prominent. Meanwhile, many arguments for health justice take a highly critical view of medical authority, even rejecting it entirely. In the early to mid-twentieth century, alternatively, as medicine rapidly professionalized, Americans came to hold the medical establishment in a particularly high regard, while many saw how it could play a crucial role in progressive politics. In this period, technologies developed, specializations grew, and medical education became standardized. With this process came inequities, as marginalized populations struggled to access the highest levels of care. Literary writers confronting social ills through their work included critiques of this new system in their writing, Ira Halpern argues. Without abandoning professional medicine, they called for alternative systems of care that could better serve diverse populations.
Halpern examines the work of several writers—including Robert Herrick, Wallace Thurman, Frank Slaughter, Charles Chesnutt, Walter White, Ralph Ellison, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Upton Sinclair, Stephen Crane, and Edith Wharton—to demonstrate how American writing from this period embedded a critical look at healthcare within other elements of progressive politics, from racial protest and women’s rights to disability justice and counter-capitalist viewpoints. Placing this writing into historical context, in terms of medical and scientific developments as well as traditions of social protest, Halpern reveals the efforts of these writers to envision better alternative trajectories for a quickly evolving medical establishment that left too many Americans without reliable care.
Oppositional Consciousness
The Subjective Roots of Social ProtestEdited by Jane J. Mansbridge and Aldon Morris
University of Chicago Press, 2001
Each essay employs a recent historical case to demonstrate how oppositional consciousness actually worked in the experience of a subordinate group. Based on participant observation and interviews, chapters focus on the successful social movements of groups such as African Americans, people with disabilities, sexually harassed women, Chicano workers, and AIDS activists. Ultimately, Oppositional Consciousness sheds new light on the intricate mechanisms that drive the important social movements of our time.
Contributors: Naomi Braine, Sharon Groch, Fredrick C. Harris, Jane Mansbridge, Anna-Maria Marshall, Aldon Morris, Marc Simon Rodriguez, Brett C. Stockdill, Lori G. Waite
The Politics of Social Protest
Comparative Perspectives on States and Social MovementsJ. Craig Jenkins and Bert Klandermans, Editors
University of Minnesota Press, 1995
The Politics of Social Protest was first published in 1995. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.
Bringing together celebrated scholars from diverse traditions and backgrounds, The Politics of Social Protest focuses on the reciprocal relationships among social movements, states, and political parties. The volume is organized around three key questions: Why do citizens resort to the often risky and demanding strategy of using disruptive protest when other channels of political intervention appear to be available? What is the relationship between social protest movements and systems of political representation? And what is the impact of the structure and development of the state on social movements themselves?
Contributors include Ronald Aminzade, University of Minnesota; Paul Burstein, University of Washington; Russell J. Dalton, University of California, Irvine; Donatella della Porta, University of Florence; Henry Dietz, University of Texas, Austin; Rachel L. Einwohner, University of Washington; Steven E. Finkel, University of Virginia; Jerrold D. Green, University of Arizona; Jocelyn Hollander, University of Washington; Hanspeter Kriesi, University of Geneva; Diarmuid Maguire, University of Sydney; Bronislaw Misztal, Indiana University, Fort Wayne; Edward N. Muller, University of Arizona; Michael Nollert, University of Trier; Karl-Dieter Opp, University of Hamburg; Dieter Rucht, Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin; Michael Wallace, Indiana University; and Gadi Wolfsfeld, Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
J. Craig Jenkins is professor of sociology at The Ohio State University. He is the author of The Politics of Insurgency: The Farm Worker Movement of the 1960's (1985).
Bert Klandermans is professor of applied social psychology at Free University in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. He has published widely on social movements in journals such as the American Sociological Review, Sociological Forum, and the European Journal of Social Psychology. He is the editor of the Social Movements, Protest, and Contention series for the University of Minnesota Press.
Copublished with UCL Press, London.