Ralph Young, "Dissent: The History of an American Idea" (NYU Press, 2015)

Summary

Ralph Young is a professor of history at Temple University. His book Dissent: The History of an American Idea (New York University Press, 2015) provides a fast-paced four hundred years people's history of dissenters in America and the role they played from early New England settlements to Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party. From Shay's rebellion in the late eighteenth century to contemporary gay rights and anti-globalist movements, dissenters built their politic on the nations founding as a project of dissent. As a group, they were committed to actualizing the lofty ideals embedded in the founding documents by extending equality and freedom to women, slaves, Indians, workers and other excluded groups. In times of crisis, dissenters called the nation back to its promise even as conservative forces resisted change. Some dissenters, celebrated as heroes, called the nation to its highest ideals; others remain lost to history or vilified. American history seen from the vantage point of those who stood against the status quo illuminates the important role dissent has played in the nation's political and social development. Young offers an abundance of examples of how political, religious, economic and social protest shape the nation and possibilities of further change.
Lilian Calles Barger, www.lilianbarger.com, is a cultural, intellectual and gender historian. Her current book project is tentatively entitled The World Come of Age: Religion, Intellectuals and the Challenge of Human Liberation is forthcoming from Oxford University Press.

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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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