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"Pacifists -- United States -- Biography"
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Emily Greene Balch
A well-known American academic and cofounder of Boston's first settlement house, Emily Greene Balch was an important Progressive Era reformer and advocate for world peace. Balch served as a professor of economics and sociology at Wellesley College for twenty years until her opposition to World War I resulted with the board of trustees refusing to renew her contract. Afterwards, Balch continued to emphasize the importance of international institutions for preventing and reconciling conflicts. She was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize in 1946 for her efforts in cofounding and leading the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF)._x000B__x000B_In tracing Balch's work at Wellesley, for the WILPF, and for other peace movements, Kristen E. Gwinn draws on a rich collection of primary sources such as letters, lectures, a draft of Balch's autobiography, and proceedings of the WILPF and other organizations in which Balch held leadership roles. Gwinn illuminates Balch's ideas on negotiated peace, internationalism, global citizenship, and diversity while providing pointed insight into her multifaceted career, philosophy, and temperament. Detailing Balch's academic research on Slavic immigration and her arguments for greater cultural and monetary cohesion in Europe, Gwinn shows how Balch's scholarship and teaching reflected her philosophical development._x000B__x000B_This first scholarly biography of Balch helps contextualize her activism while taking into consideration changes in American attitudes toward war and female intellectuals in the early twentieth century.
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American Gandhi
When Abraham Johannes Muste died in 1967, newspapers throughout the world referred to him as the \"American Gandhi.\" Best known for his role in the labor movement of the 1930s and his leadership of the peace movement in the postwar era, Muste was one of the most charismatic figures of the American left in his time. Had he written the story of his life, it would also have been the story of social and political struggles in the United States during the twentieth century.In American Gandhi, Leilah Danielson establishes Muste's distinctive activism as the work of a prophet and a pragmatist. Muste warned that the revolutionary dogmatism of the Communist Party would prove a dead end, understood the moral significance of racial equality, argued early in the Cold War that American pacifists should not pick a side, and presaged the spiritual alienation of the New Left from the liberal establishment. At the same time, Muste was committed to grounding theory in practice and the individual in community. His open, pragmatic approach fostered some of the most creative and remarkable innovations in progressive thought and practice in the twentieth century, including the adaptation of Gandhian nonviolence for American concerns and conditions.A biography of Muste's evolving political and religious views, American Gandhi also charts the rise and fall of American progressivism over the course of the twentieth century and offers the possibility of its renewal in the twenty-first.
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Working for Peace and Justice
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.
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Baroness of Hobcaw
The riveting biography of an heiress, equestrienne, spy-hunter, and patron of ecology
Belle W. Baruch (1899-1964) could outride, outshoot, outhunt, and outsail most of the young men of her elite social circle—abilities that distanced her from other debutantes of 1917. Unapologetic for her athleticism and interests in traditionally masculine pursuits, Baruch towered above male and female counterparts in height and daring. While she is known today for the wildlife conservation and biological research center on the South Carolina coast that bears her family name, Belle's story is a rich narrative about one nonconformist's ties to the land. In Baroness of Hobcaw, Mary E. Miller provides a provocative portrait of this unorthodox woman who gave a gift of monumental importance to the scientific community.
Belle's father, Bernard M. Baruch, the so-called Wolf of Wall Street, held sway over the financial and diplomatic world of the early twentieth century and served as an adviser to seven U.S. presidents. In 1905 he bought Hobcaw Barony, a sprawling seaside retreat where he entertained the likes of Churchill and FDR. Belle's daily life at Hobcaw reflects the world of wealthy northerners, including the Vanderbilts and Luces, who bought tracts of southern acreage. Miller details Belle's exploits—fox hunting at Hobcaw, show jumping at Deauville, flying her own plane, traveling with Edith Bolling Wilson, and patrolling the South Carolina beach for spies during World War II. Belle's story also reveals her efforts to win her mother's approval and her father's attention, as well as her unraveling relationships with friends, family, employees, and lovers—both male and female. Miller describes Belle's final success in saving Hobcaw from development as the overarching triumph of a tempestuous life.
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Blessed Are the Peacemakers
An uncommon and intimate account of the lives of two
conscientious objectors In the summer of 2013,
Suzanne Kesler Rumsey discovered hundreds of letters exchanged
between her late grandparents, Miriam and Benjamin Kesler. The
letters, written between 1941 and 1946, were filled with typical
wartime sentiments: love and longing, anguish at being apart,
uncertainty about the war and the country’s future, and
attempts at humor to keep their spirits up. What is unusual about
their story is that Ben Kesler was not writing from a theater of
war. Instead, Ben, a member of the Dunkard Brethren Church, was a
conscientious objector. He, along with about 12,000 other men,
opted to join the Civilian Public Service (CPS) and contribute to
“work of national importance” at one of the 218 CPS
camps around the country. In
Blessed Are the Peacemakers: Small Histories during World War
II, Letter Writing, and Family History Methodology , Rumsey
has mined not only her grandparents’ letters but also
archival research on CPS camps and historical data from several
Mennonite and Brethren archives to recapture the narrative of
Ben’s service at two different camps and of Miriam’s
struggle to support herself and her husband financially at the
young age of seventeen. Ben and Miriam’s life during the
war was extraordinarily ordinary, spanning six years of
unrecognized and humble work for their country. Ben was not
compensated for his work in the camps, and Miriam stayed home and
worked as a day laborer, as a live-in maid, as a farmhand, and in
the family butcher shop in order to earn enough money to support
them both. Small histories like that of her grandparents, Rumsey
argues, provide a unique perspective on significant political and
historical moments.
Blessed Are the Peacemakers also explores the rhetorical
functions of letter writing as well as the methodology of family
history writing. Ben and Miriam’s letters provide an apt
backdrop to examine the genre, a relatively understudied mode of
literacy. Rumsey situates the young couple’s correspondence
within
ars dictaminis , the art of letter writing, granting new
insights into the genre and how personal accounts shape our
understanding of historical events.
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