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"Peace movements -- History -- 20th century"
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A Band of Noble Women
A Band of Noble Women brings together the histories of the women’s peace movement and the black women’s club and social reform movement in a story of community and consciousness building between the world wars. Believing that achievement of improved race relations was a central step in establishing world peace, African American and white women initiated new political alliances that challenged the practices of Jim Crow segregation and promoted the leadership of women in transnational politics. Under the auspices of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), they united the artistic agenda of the Harlem Renaissance, suffrage-era organizing tactics, and contemporary debates on race in their efforts to expand women’s influence on the politics of war and peace. Plastas shows how WILPF espoused middle-class values and employed gendered forms of organization building, educating thousands of people on issues ranging from U.S. policies in Haiti and Liberia to the need for global disarmament. Highlighting WILPF chapters in Philadelphia, Cleveland, and Baltimore, the author examines the successes of this interracial movement as well as its failures. A Band of Noble Women enables us to examine more fully the history of race in U.S. women’s movements and illuminates the role of the women’s peace movement in setting the foundation for the civil rights movement
eBook
The politics of peace : a global Cold War history
\"During a live television broadcast with Harold MacMillan in 1959, US President Dwight D. Eisenhower remarked that \"people in the long run are going to do more to promote peace than our governments.\" At that very moment international peace organizations, some with roots in the First World War and others responding to the post-World War II environment, were bypassing national governments to create alternative institutions for the promotion of world peace. These groups, which included the Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy (SANE) and the World Peace Council (WPC), mounted the first serious challenge to the state-centered conduct of international relations. The Politics of Peace examines both the ideals and pragmatic aspects of international relations during the early cold war. By tracing the myriad ways in which a broad spectrum of people involved in and affected by the cold war used, altered, and fought over this seemingly universal concept, it deconstructs the assumed binary between realist and idealist foreign policy approaches. It argues that a politics of peace emerged in the 1950s and '60s as a result of the gradual convergence between idealism and realism and through the dynamic interaction among three global actors: Cold War states, peace advocacy groups, and anti-colonial liberationists. As discourses on peace emerged in a variety of places, transnational networks emerged that challenged and eventually undermined the Cold War order. This book deterritorializes the Cold War by revealing the multiple divides that emerged within each Cold War camp, as peace activists challenged their own governments over the right path toward global peace. The Politics of Peace demonstrates that the Cold War was both more ubiquitous and less territorial than previously assumed.\"--Provided by publisher.
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Cold War Progressives
In recognizing the relation between gender, race, and class oppression, American women of the postwar Progressive Party made the claim that peace required not merely the absence of violence, but also the presence of social and political equality. For progressive women, peace was the essential thread that connected the various aspects of their activist agendas. This study maps the routes taken by postwar popular front women activists into peace and freedom movements of the 1960s and 1970s. Historian Jacqueline Castledine tells the story of their decades-long effort to keep their intertwined social and political causes from unraveling and to maintain the connections among peace, feminism, and racial equality._x000B__x000B_Postwar progressive women and their allies often saw themselves as members of a popular front promoting the rights of workers, women, and African Americans under the banner of peace. However, the Cold War indelibly shaped the contours of their activism. Following the Progressive Party's demise in the 1950s, these activists reentered social and political movements in the early 1960s and met the inescapable reality that their agenda was a casualty of the left-liberal political division of the early Cold War era. Many Americans now viewed peace as a leftist concern associated with Soviet sympathizers and civil rights as the favored cause of liberals. Faced with the dilemma of working to reunite these movements or choosing between them, some progressive women chose to lead such New Left organizations as the Jeannette Rankin Brigade while others became leaders of liberal \"second wave\" feminist movements._x000B__x000B_Whether they committed to affiliating with groups that emphasized one issue over others or attempted to found groups with broad popular-front type agendas, Progressive women brought to their later work an understanding of how race, class, and gender intersect in women's organizing. These women's stories demonstrate that the ultimate result of Cold War-era McCarthyism was not the defeat of women's activism, but rather its reconfiguration._x000B_
eBook
Hell No : the forgotten power of the Vietnam peace movement
\"'Hell no' was the battle cry of the largest peace movement in American history--the effort to end the Vietnam War, which included thousands of veterans. The movement was divided among radicals, revolutionaries, sectarians, moderates, and militants, which legions of paid FBI informants and government provocateurs tried to destroy. Despite these obstacles millions marched, resisted the draft on campuses, and forced two sitting presidents from office. This movement was a watershed in our history, yet today it is in danger of being forgotten, condemned by its critics for everything from cowardice to stab-in-the-back betrayal. In this indispensable essay, Tom Hayden, a principal anti-Vietnam War organizer, calls to account elites who want to forget the Vietnam peace movement and excoriates those who trivialize its impact, engage in caricature of protesters and question their patriotism. In so doing, he seeks both a reckoning and a healing of national memory.\" -- Publisher's description
Book
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.
eBook
Building a just and secure world : Popular Front women's struggle for peace and justice in Chicago during the 1960s
\"This work discusses the activism in the 60s of progressive women who came of age during the Popular Front era of the 30s and 40s\"-- Provided by publisher.
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Peace and Freedom
Two great social causes held center stage in American politics in the 1960s: the civil rights movement and the antiwar groundswell in the face of a deepening American military commitment in Vietnam. InPeace and Freedom, Simon Hall explores two linked themes: the civil rights movement's response to the war in Vietnam on the one hand and, on the other, the relationship between the black groups that opposed the war and the mainstream peace movement. Based on comprehensive archival research, the book weaves together local and national stories to offer an illuminating and judicious chronicle of these movements, demonstrating how their increasingly radicalized components both found common cause and provoked mutual antipathies.Peace and Freedomshows how and why the civil rights movement responded to the war in differing ways-explaining black militants' hostility toward the war while also providing a sympathetic treatment of those organizations and leaders reluctant to take a stand. And, while Black Power, counterculturalism, and left-wing factionalism all made interracial coalition-building more difficult, the book argues that it was the peace movement's reluctance to link the struggle to end the war with the fight against racism at home that ultimately prevented the two movements from cooperating more fully. Considering the historical relationship between the civil rights movement and foreign policy, Hall also offers an in-depth look at the history of black America's links with the American left and with pacifism. With its keen insights into one of the most controversial decades in American history,Peace and Freedomrecaptures the immediacy and importance of the time.
eBook
The nuclear crisis
In 1983, more than one million Germans joined to protest NATO's deployment of nuclear missiles in Europe. This volume survey of the \"Euromissiles\" crisis as experienced by its various protagonists in Germany, including NATO's strategic maneuvering and the contours of the German protest movement.
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