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A longtime agitator against war and social injustice, Lawrence Wittner has been tear-gassed, threatened by police with drawn guns, charged by soldiers with fixed bayonets, spied upon by the U.S. government, arrested, and purged from his job for political -reasons. To say that this teacher-historian-activist has led an interesting life is a considerable understatement. In this absorbing memoir, Wittner traces the dramatic course of a life and career that took him from a Brooklyn boyhood in the 1940s and ’50s to an education at Columbia University and the University of Wisconsin to the front lines of peace activism, the fight for racial equality, and the struggles of the labor movement. He details his family background, which included the bloody anti-Semitic pogroms of late-nineteenth-century Eastern Europe, and chronicles his long teaching career, which comprised positions at a small black college in Virginia, an elite women’s liberal arts college north of New York City, and finally a permanent home at the Albany campus of the State University of New York. Throughout, he packs the narrative with colorful vignettes describing such activities as fighting racism in Louisiana and Mississippi during the early 1960s, collaborating with peace-oriented intellectuals in Gorbachev’s Soviet Union, and leading thousands of antinuclear demonstrators through the streets of Hiroshima. As the book also reveals, Wittner’s work as an activist was matched by scholarly achievements that made him one of the world’s foremost authorities on the history of the peace and nuclear disarmament movements—a research specialty that led to revealing encounters with such diverse figures as Norman Thomas, the Unabomber, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Caspar Weinberger, and David Horowitz. A tenured professor and renowned author who has nevertheless lived in tension with the broader currents of his society, Lawrence Wittner tells an engaging personal story that includes some of the most turbulent and significant events of recent history. Lawrence S. Wittner, emeritus professor of history at the University at Albany, SUNY, is the author of numerous scholarly works, including the award-winning three-volume Struggle Against the Bomb . Among other awards and honors, he has received major grants or fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Aspen Institute, the United States Institute of Peace, and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

Although the US Government has fought numerous wars over the course of American history, it has also been confronted by a vigorous peace movement that, on some occasions, has halted US wars and, on others, has prevented wars from occurring. Thanks to their ability to mobilise public opinion and substantial numbers of public officials against war, peace activists played a key role in ending US wars in Mexico, Vietnam, Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Iraq, as well as in ending the Cold War. They also were remarkably effective in averting war with Mexico and in preventing the outbreak of nuclear war.

The great upsurge of anti-nuclear activism during the early 1980s is usually traced to either the dangerous Soviet-US nuclear confrontation of that era, or to NATO's December 1979 decision to deploy cruise and Pershing II missiles in Western Europe. In reality, however, the nuclear disarmament campaign began in the preceding years. Despite two earlier waves of anti-nuclear agitation, the once-vigorous citizens' movement for nuclear disarmament was dormant by the early 1970s. But, from 1975 to 1978, a variety of factors converged to awaken disarmament activists from their torpor, and to spark their return to anti-nuclear agitation. These included: the end of the Vietnam War, which enabled peace activists to turn their attention elsewhere; the rise of environmental concerns, especially the growing fear of nuclear power; the 1978 UN Special Session on Disarmament, which focused movement and popular attention upon the nuclear arms race; and the erosion of Soviet-US détente. Significantly, this blend of factors included a number that went beyond the reviving Soviet-US nuclear arms race of the 1970s. In this context, the nuclear disarmament movement began to emerge as a political force once again in Western Europe, North America, and the Pacific. It also showed stirrings of life in Eastern Europe and elsewhere. Consequently, although the movement would grow far larger and more effective subsequently, by late 1978 it had created much of the structure that enabled it, in the early 1980s, to pose a substantial challenge to the nuclear policies of the great powers.

In this introduction to the special issue on peace history, the emergence of this sub-field of both history and peace research is briefly described, and some of its organizational aspects as well as scholarly achievements are highlighted. The increasing breadth of peace history since its establishment in the 1960s is illustrated, particularly through its focus on grass-roots peacemaking and attention to topics that in the past have been frequently marginalized by mainstream history (with its concentration on traditional diplomatic history and elite foreign policy decisionmaking). The growth of civil society and citizens' increasing involvement in issues concerning war and peace are providing a rich source for historical analysis. A summary is included of the six case studies which follow. They deal with such subjects as women's anti-war campaigning in the 1930s, conscientious objectors in the 1940s and the anti-nuclear movements of the 1970s and 1980s. Spanning the 20th century and drawn from three continents, these studies show the potential as well as the difficulties inherent in popular peace advocacy.