Leilah Danielson, "American Gandhi" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2014)

Summary

Leilah Danielson is an Associate Professor of History at Northern Arizona University and author of American Gandhi: A.J. Muste and the History of Radicalism in the Twentieth Century (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014). American Gandhi is a political, intellectual and religious biography of the pacifist, labor educator and organizer A.J. Muste whose radical career and influence stretched over the course of the twentieth century. Danielson examines how Muste combined a religious prophetic tradition with pragmatism, and an evolving pacifism, against revolutionary dogma and humanism. Muste, committed to grounding theory in practice and the individual in community, argued that economic democracy was the means toward political democracy. As part of the left, his influence included an American adaptation of Gandhian nonviolence resistance applied to the cause of labor, civil rights, antiwar, anti-nuclear, the authoritarian state and anticolonial movements. Danielson charts the private and personal evolution of a religious radical through the loss and recovery of faith and his role as a vanguard leader of multiple movements. Muste's pragmatic yet principled and radical approach fostered some of the most creative and remarkable innovations in progressive thought in the twentieth century. Danielson's research corrects the historical neglect of Muste and recovers an often-unrecognized figure whose influence remains.

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Lilian Calles Barger

Lilian Calles Barger is a cultural, intellectual and gender historian. Her most recent book is entitled The World Come of Age: An Intellectual History of Liberation Theology (Oxford University Press, 2018). Her current writing project is on the cultural and intellectual history of women and the origins of feminism seen through the emblematic life and work of Simone de Beauvoir.

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