Seven Social Movements That Changed America
by Linda Gordon
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Pub Date Mar 04 2025 | Archive Date Feb 28 2025
W. W. Norton & Company | Liveright
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Description
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.
Advance Praise
"Gordon examines seven important social movements of the twentieth century, how they were organized on a grassroots level, and how they have influenced American society.... Considering the impact these movements continue to have even in the present day, modern readers will not only derive historical value from these stories but also insights applicable to today’s social upheavals." -Booklist
"Bancroft Prize–winning historian Gordon considers critical changes in American life through an examination of seven movements that arose from the 1890s through the 1970s.... Besides profiling movement leaders, Gordon pays close attention to what she calls their 'followership,' individuals not usually identified as leaders but who developed and promoted strategies and tactics that enabled movements to succeed.... Whether they affect lasting change, social movements generate camaraderie, solidarity, and the shared conviction that 'risks are worth taking.'" A timely, stirring history." -Kirkus Reviews, starred review
"Distinguished historian Linda Gordon explores where social movements come from, how they operate, and how they have introduced lasting change in American life. She shows us how over more than a century, on both political right and left, citizens have taken matters into their own hands in ways that have been foundational to the history and practice of American democracy. It is a book that at once explains and inspires." -Drew Gilpin Faust, author of This Republic of Suffering, Pulitzer Prize finalist
"With characteristic élan, Linda Gordon’s beautifully realized and quite riveting analytical history probes the origins, qualities, and effects of social movements that mobilized millions. She reveals how these mass efforts overcame problems of collective action to alter the landscape of American life." -Ira Katznelson, author of Fear Itself, winner of the Bancroft Prize
"Whether you are familiar with one, many, or none of these seven stories, you will find yourself riveted as Linda Gordon’s wise and clear voice shows how American society advances itself—for better and for worse—through the social movements that make its democracy real. . . . Shimmering with original insights on leadership and ‘followership,’ this fascinating treatment renews understanding of each social movement as Gordon sets them in subtle comparative proximity.”" -Nancy F. Cott, author of Fighting Words
"One of our nation’s foremost historians, Linda Gordon details the role of community activism in American democracy across the twentieth century. At turns sobering and inspiring, Gordon’s vivid case studies of popular social movements—from the Ku Klux Klan to women’s liberation—reveal the power people can exercise when they organize together to promote change." -Nicole Eustace, author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning Covered with Night
Available Editions
| EDITION | Hardcover |
| ISBN | 9781631493713 |
| PRICE | $39.99 (USD) |
| PAGES | 528 |
