Courses

This seminar examines the history of the radical left in the United States from the Revolutionary era to the present.  Readings treat influential individuals, organizations, intellectual currents, and social movements on the left with an attention to their relationship to prevailing understandings of American citizenship, personal fulfillment and equality.  After exploring early forms of artisans´ and workingmen´s radicalism, as well as the antebellum abolitionist and women´s rights movement, we will focus on the development and the fate of the modern left--from the Populist, labor, anarchist, socialist, and Communist movements through the African-American freedom struggle, radical pacifism and the New Left of the 1960s, feminism, the religious left, union democracy movements and beyond. We will try to understand the aspirations and ideas, forms of organization and activism, relations to mainstream politics and state authority, successes and failures in each of these cases.