How do social movements arise, wield power, and bring about meaningful change? Renowned scholar Linda Gordon investigates these and other salient questions in this visionary, cautionary, timely, and utterly necessary book (Nicole Eustace), narrating how some of America's most influential twentieth-century social movements transformed the nation.

Beginning with the turn-of-the century settlement house movement, the book compares Chicago's celebrated Hull-House, begun by privileged women, to a much less well known African American project, Cleveland's Phillis Wheatley House, begun by a former sharecropper. Expanding her highly praised book The Second Coming of the KKK, the second chapter shows how a northern Klan became a mass movement in the 1920s. Contrary to what many Klan opponents thought, this KKK was a middle-class organization, its members primarily urban and well educated. In the 1930s, the KKK gave birth to dozens of American fascist groups--small but extremely violent. Profiles of two other 1930s movements follow: the Townsend campaign for old-age insurance, named for its charismatic leader, Dr. Francis Townsend. It created the public pressure that brought us Social Security, which was considered radical at the time, as was the movement to bring about federal unemployment aid for millions.

Proceeding to the 1955-1956 Montgomery bus boycott--which jump-started the career of Martin Luther King, Jr.--the narrative shows how the city's entire Black population refused to ride segregated buses; initiated by Black women, their years-long, hard-fought victory inspired the civil rights movement. Gordon then examines the 1970s farmworkers struggle, led by Cesar Chavez and made possible by the work of tens of thousands of the primarily Mexican American farmworkers. Together they built the United Farm Workers Union, winning better wages and working conditions for some of the country's poorest workers. The book concludes with the dramatic stories of two Boston socialist feminist groups, Bread and Roses and the Combahee River Collective, which influenced the whole women's liberation movement.

Throughout the work, Gordon concentrates not on ideologies but on how millions of grassroots activists strategized and changed the United States. Separately and together, these seven narratives bring to life the creativity and hard work of social movements, and in doing so reveal how they have been central to American history, in stories that reverberate with today's political activism.

Extraordinary national acclaim accompanied the publication of award-winning historian Linda Gordon's disturbing and markedly timely history of the reassembled Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s. Dramatically challenging our preconceptions of the hooded Klansmen responsible for establishing a Jim Crow racial hierarchy in the 1870s South, this second Klan spread in states principally above the Mason-Dixon line by courting xenophobic fears surrounding the flood of immigrant hordes landing on American shores. Part cautionary tale, part expose (Washington Post), The Second Coming of the KKK illuminates the surprising scope of the movement (The New Yorker); the Klan attracted four-to-six-million members through secret rituals, manufactured news stories, and mass Klonvocations prior to its collapse in 1926--but not before its potent ideology of intolerance became part and parcel of the American tradition. A must-read (Salon) for anyone looking to understand the current moment, The Second Coming of the KKK offers chilling comparisons to the present day (New York Review of Books).

Censored by the U.S. Army, Dorothea Lange's unseen photographs are the extraordinary photographic record of the Japanese American internment saga. This indelible work of visual and social history confirms Dorothea Lange's stature as one of the twentieth century's greatest American photographers. Presenting 119 images originally censored by the U.S. Army--the majority of which have never been published--Impounded evokes the horror of a community uprooted in the early 1940s and the stark reality of the internment camps. With poignancy and sage insight, nationally known historians Linda Gordon and Gary Okihiro illuminate the saga of Japanese American internment: from life before Executive Order 9066 to the abrupt roundups and the marginal existence in the bleak, sandswept camps. In the tradition of Roman Vishniac's A Vanished World, Impounded, with the immediacy of its photographs, tells the story of the thousands of lives unalterably shattered by racial hatred brought on by the passions of war. A San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of 2006.

Extraordinary national acclaim accompanied the publication of award-winning historian Linda Gordon's disturbing and markedly timely history of the reassembled Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s. Dramatically challenging our preconceptions of the hooded Klansmen responsible for establishing a Jim Crow racial hierarchy in the 1870s South, this second Klan spread in states principally above the Mason-Dixon line by courting xenophobic fears surrounding the flood of immigrant hordes landing on American shores. Part cautionary tale, part expose (Washington Post), The Second Coming of the KKK illuminates the surprising scope of the movement (The New Yorker); the Klan attracted four-to-six-million members through secret rituals, manufactured news stories, and mass Klonvocations prior to its collapse in 1926?but not before its potent ideology of intolerance became part and parcel of the American tradition. A must-read (Salon) for anyone looking to understand the current moment, The Second Coming of the KKK offers chilling comparisons to the present day (New York Review of Books). 8 pages of illustrations

In 1904, New York nuns brought forty Irish orphans to a remote Arizona mining camp, to be placed with Catholic families. The Catholic families were Mexican, as was the majority of the population. Soon the town's Anglos, furious at this interracial transgression, formed a vigilante squad that kidnapped the children and nearly lynched the nuns and the local priest. The Catholic Church sued to get its wards back, but all the courts, including the U.S. Supreme Court, ruled in favor of the vigilantes.

The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction tells this disturbing and dramatic tale to illuminate the creation of racial boundaries along the Mexican border. Clifton/Morenci, Arizona, was a wild West boomtown, where the mines and smelters pulled in thousands of Mexican immigrant workers. Racial walls hardened as the mines became big business and whiteness became a marker of superiority. These already volatile race and class relations produced passions that erupted in the orphan incident. To the Anglos of Clifton/Morenci, placing a white child with a Mexican family was tantamount to child abuse, and they saw their kidnapping as a rescue.

Women initiated both sides of this confrontation. Mexican women agreed to take in these orphans, both serving their church and asserting a maternal prerogative; Anglo women believed they had to save the orphans, and they organized a vigilante squad to do it. In retelling this nearly forgotten piece of American history, Linda Gordon brilliantly recreates and dissects the tangled intersection of family and racial values, in a gripping story that resonates with today's conflicts over the best interests of the child.

Choice Magazine's Outstanding Academic Books for 2004The only book to cover the entire history of birth control and the intense controversies about reproduction rights that have raged in the United States for more than 150 years, The Moral Property of Women is a thoroughly updated and revised version of the award-winning historian Linda Gordon's classic history Woman's Body, Woman's Right, originally published in 1976.Arguing that reproduction control has always been central to women's status, The Moral Property of Women shows how opposition to it has long been part of the conservative opposition to gender equality. From its roots in folk medicine and in a campaign so broad it constituted a grassroots social movement at some points in history, to its legitimization through public policy, the widespread acceptance of birth control has involved a major reorientation of sexual values.

Gordon puts today's reproduction control controversies--foreign aid for family planning, the abortion debates, teenage pregnancy and childbearing, stem-cell research--into historical perspective and shows how the campaign to legalize abortion is part of a 150-year-old struggle over reproductive rights, a struggle that has followed a circuitous path. Beginning with the folk medicine of birth control, Gordon discusses how the backlash against the first women's rights movement of the 1800s prohibited both abortion and contraception about 130 years ago. She traces the campaign for legal reproduction control from the 1870s to the present and argues that attitudes toward birth control have been inseparable from family values, especially standards about sexuality and gender equality.

Highlighting both leaders and followers in the struggle, The Moral Property of Women chronicles the contributions of well-known reproduction control pioneers such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Margaret Sanger, and Emma Goldman, as well as lesser- known campaigners including the utopian socialist Robert Dale Owen, the three doctors Foote--Edward Bliss Foote, Edward Bond Foote, and Mary Bond Foote--the civil libertarian Mary Ware Dennett, and the daring Jane project of the 1970s, in which Chicago women's liberation activists performed illegal abortions.

This volume offers information on how, for 50 years, the bush Kaliai in Melanesia have worked the deserted cargo left by US Marines during World War II into their indigenous culture. The author seeks to show how cargo cults in general bring together past, present and future.

Not to Worry, Lucille is designed to teach young children that humans and all members of the universe rely on God for sustenance and do so on faith. With children increasingly exposed to life's uncertainties and adult concepts of terror, death and fear, it is important to introduce the concept of an all-powerful and benevolent Creator.

Not to Worry, Lucille is designed to teach young children that humans and all members of the universe rely on God for sustenance and do so on faith. With children increasingly exposed to life's uncertainties and adult concepts of terror, death and fear, it is important to introduce the concept of an all-powerful and benevolent Creator.

Not to Worry, Lucille is designed to teach young children that humans and all members of the universe rely on God for sustenance and do so on faith. With children increasingly exposed to life's uncertainties and adult concepts of terror, death and fear, it is important to introduce the concept of an all-powerful and benevolent Creator.

Not to Worry, Lucille is designed to teach young children that humans and all members of the universe rely on God for sustenance and do so on faith. With children increasingly exposed to life's uncertainties and adult concepts of terror, death and fear, it is important to introduce the concept of an all-powerful and benevolent Creator.

In this unflinching history of family violence, Linda Gordon traces policies on child abuse and neglect, wife beating, and incest from 1880 to 1960. Gordon begins with the so-called discovery of family violence in the 1870s, when experts first identified it as a social rather than personal problem. From there, Gordon chronicles the changing visibility of family violence as gender, family, and political ideologies shifted and the women's and civil rights movements gained strength. Throughout, she illustrates how public perceptions of issues like marriage, poverty, alcoholism, mental illness, and responsibility worked for and against the victims of family violence, and looks at the link between family violence and larger social problems.

Powerful and moving, Heroes of Their Own Lives offers an honest understanding of a persistent problem and a realistic view of the difficulties in stopping it.