American Dreamers: How the Left Changed a Nation

American Dreamers: How the Left Changed a Nation

By Michael Kazin

A panoramic yet intimate history of the American left — of the reformers, radicals, and idealists who have fought for a more just and humane society, from the abolitionists to Michael Moore and Noam Chomsky — that gives us a revelatory new way of looking at two centuries of American politics and culture.

Michael Kazin — one of the most respected historians of American politics working today — takes us from abolitionism and early feminism to the labor struggles of the industrial age, through the emergence of anarchists, socialists, and communists, right up to the new left in the 1960s and ’70s.

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Reviews of American Dreamers

"Michael Kazin's American Dreamers: How the Left Changed a Nation. Kazin, of Georgetown, is one of the great historians of American social movements, and though he is on the broad left, he has written sympathetically about figures not always associated with the left like William Jennings Bryan. This history deftly and honestly describes the victories and failures of the various left-wing movements in U.S. history and, even in a body of work as formidable as Kazin's, really stands out for its erudition and intelligence." Read more

– Newsweek

"'American Dreamers' is Kazin's bid to reclaim the left's utopian spirit for an age of diminished expectations. An editor at Dissent magazine and one of the left's most eloquent spokesmen, Kazin presents his book as an unapologetic attempt to give the left a history it can celebrate. For more than two centuries, he writes, American radicals have sounded the alarm about crucial injustices — slavery, industrial exploitation, women's oppression — that the rest of society refused to see. It is time for the left to stand up and take credit for these efforts." Read more

– Beverly Gage, New York Times Book Review

"Kazin is a lucid writer and a capable synthesizer, drawing together strands of politics, economics and culture across a broad sweep of American history. His narrative unearths the obscure contributions of Frances White, who urged her sexually integrated audiences to "turn your churches into halls of science," and revisits the great works of Frederick Douglass and Elizabeth Cady Stanton in the overlapping causes of abolition and women's suffrage. He describes the union leaders and rivalries that defined the early 20th century left, and he pays homage to the counterculture of the 1960s, including the iconic Tom Hayden ("Mickey," one colleague reports after meeting Hayden, "I've just seen the next Lenin.")." Read more

– Jim Newton, Los Angeles Times

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