Ebook: Direct action: protest and the reinvention of American radicalism

"As Americans take to the streets in record numbers to resist the presidency of Donald Trump, L.A. Kauffman's history of protest offers insights into how past movements have won victories in times of crisis and backlash and how they can be most effective today. This account, twenty-five years in the making, traces the evolution of disruptive protest since the Sixties to tell a larger story about the reshaping of the American left. Kauffman, a longtime grassroots organizer, examines how movements from ACT UP to Occupy Wall Street to Black Lives Matter have used disruptive tactics to catalyze change despite long odds. Kauffman's history is propelled by hundreds of interviews conducted over a span of decades. Direct Action showcases the voices of key players in an array of movements -- environmentalist, anti-nuclear, anti-apartheid, feminist, LGBTQ, anti-globalization, racial-justice, anti-war, and more -- across an era when American politics shifted to the right, and a constellation of decentralized issue- and identity-based movements supplanted the older ideal of a single, unified left. Now, as protest movements again take on a central and urgent political role, Kauffman's history offers both lessons for the current moment and an overview of the landscape of recent activism" (ed.).