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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.

In 1991, there were some protests prior to the Persian Gulf War. But once the war started, patriotism reigned. [Lawrence Wittner] said there is frequently a surge of patriotism when a war starts, but the longer a conflict lasts, the more dissent grows. Much of this early anti-war sentiment had roots in Christianity. In 1815, a devout Christian named David Low Dodge founded the first known formally organized U.S. peace group: the New York Peace Society. In 1828 the American Peace Society was formed, and America's anti-war movement was launched. The peace movement surged again during the Spanish-American War, which protesters saw as an attempt to build an American empire. In this period, many of the voices for peace came from the upper class. But during World War I, the loudest voices of protest came from the working class.

Magnet for hostility. [Kathy DiBernardo], in a demonstration opposing strikes against Afghanistan, waves an American flag and Earth flag near Lake Eola. She and other demonstrators have been subject to harassment. JOHN RAOUX/ORLANDO SENTINEL Lighting the way. Kathy DiBernardo assembles candle torches at the Stone Soup Collective before a peace vigil Oct. 7 at Lake Eola. She is a founder of the Orlando Coalition for Alternatives to War. SHOUN A. HILL/ORLANDO SENTINEL

In the international peace movement -- ranging from the valiant Women Strike for Peace to the persistent Fellowship of Reconciliation -- no shortage exists of dissenters willing to defy governments that trust in nuclear weapons to solve conflicts. Where a shortage -- of another kind -- can be found is among the media, in the journalistic decisions of editors and reporters to dismiss the nuclear disarmament movement as a collection of fringe rebels unversed in the ways of national security and too emotional to appreciate the wisdom of \"peace through strength.\" In April 1957 Albert Schweitzer, the German physician and theologian who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1952, issued his \"Declaration of Conscience,\" a statement that appealed to the public to rally against testing nuclear bombs. Responses from the American press ranged from indifference to scorn, with the New York Daily News running an editorial titled \"Pull In Your Horns, Doc.\" Schweitzer's \"long-winded epistle,\" the paper said, echoed \"the stale Communist propaganda about how nuclear fall-out is a fearful danger . . . {Readers should} laugh off this Schweitzer manifesto.\" Despite the disdain of newspaper people (writers of \"the first rough draft of history,\" in Philip Graham's phrase), writers of the second draft (reality-grounded historians) appear to be doing better. One of them is Lawrence S. Wittner, a professor of history at the State University of New York at Albany since 1974 and a former president of the Peace History Society. Every ounce the equal of, and in some ways superior to, such war historians as Stephen E. Ambrose and Shelby Foote, Wittner combines mastery of informational detail with breadth of credible analysis. On one level -- the inspirational -- he tells the story of conscience as found in the words and stands of A.J. Muste, Dorothy Day, Linus and Ava Pauling, Dagmar Wilson, Elise and Kenneth Boulding, David McReynolds, Seymour Melman, Joseph Rotblat, Danilo Dolci and others. On another level -- the political -- Wittner spreads out carefully researched facts to document his conclusion that \"without the spur of organized agitation, opposition to the Bomb might well have remained a silent undercurrent, overridden by the conventional wisdom that the greater a nation's military strength, the greater its security. Certainly, government officials took the movement seriously enough. Some praised and courted it, while others turned angrily on antinuclear agitators, whom they blamed, with considerable justification, for shattering public complacency and instigating serious challenges to their nuclear policies.\"

Glen Harold Stassen, Smedes Professor of Christian Ethics, Fuller Theological Seminary, in addition to Peace Action: Past Present, and Future has authored Just Peacemaking: Transforming Initiatives for Peace and Justice, Living the Sermon on the Mount, and Kingdom Ethics. He is a respected activist and scholar and is a board member of Peace Action. Congresswoman [Barbara Lee] was elected to represent California's ninth Congressional District in 1998. She is the Co-Chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, First Vice-Chair of the Congressional Black Caucus and a Senior Democratic Whip.

The peace symbol has certainly come a long way from its original intent. Fifty years ago this month Englishman Gerald Holtom, a conscientious objector during World War II, designed the symbol for the antinuclear group Direct Action Committee Against Nuclear War, and it soon after became the permanent logo for the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. The sign - whose design revolves around the letters \"N\" and \"D\" to highlight the group's main objective - made its first public appearance during a protest march from Trafalgar Square to Aldermaston, where researchers were developing nuclear weapons. \"It's still going against the grain of dominant culture,\" said [Lawrence Wittner], the author of \"The Struggle Against the Bomb\" and a national board member of the antinuclear group Peace Action (whose symbol is a dove). \"The peace symbol is still a cutting edge symbol.\" [Ken Kolsbun] argues that using the peace symbol to sell knickknacks doesn't really hurt. \"It's being exploited, but that's the way we do it in America,\" he said. \"But that's not going to dampen the meaning.\"

[Lawrence S. Wittner] piques the reader's curiosity from the opening chapter as he introduces the story from the viewpoint of a visitor from a distant galaxy. The visitor observations of \"the Earthians' educational system\" are something unnoticed while attention had been drawn by \"The Backward Planet\" inhabitants' proclivity to destroy one another and the environment. But developments at UAardvark gave the observers inspiration to tell the story for their own use. They relate it via \"the employment of a native Earthian.\" He also paints the ruling class types with a broad, cartoon brush. But this heightens the appropriate sarcasm and sardonic wit to the story line. Wittner's punchy prose and mostly short chapters give a flow and pace to the story, a fun take on the sadness of a system gone haywire as capitalism foreshortens all traditional, complex, democratic institutions. UAardvark's administrators and the grandiose and greedy plutocrats have hatched their latest quest for capital's spoils and it's, well... unbelievable.

Over the years I've benefited from [Larry Wittner]'s scholarship and his translation of academese into plainly understandable writing. His latest book, Working for Peace and Justice, is his memoir, a delightful and typically Wittnerian volume in some ways, and an outlier from his oeuvre in others. He is thoroughly professional in his familial research, tracing it all the way back three generations to the persecuted Jewish communities in Poland and Russia, then to his immediate family roots in New York, digging up historical data that grounds his story in a solid societal and cultural fashion. The professional historian's application to his own family makes this a stronger memoir than most, and the personal voice of the memoir really makes the history vital.

Clinton reviews Toward Nuclear Abolition: A History of the World Nuclear Disarmament Movement, 1971 to the Present by Lawrence Wittner.

Harahan reviews The Struggle Against the Bomb. Vol 3. Towards Nuclear Abolition: A History of the World Nuclear Disarmament Movement, 1971 to the Present by Lawrence S. Wittner.