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Nonviolence in America book cover
Nonviolence in America
A Documentary History
1966
First Published
3.91
Average Rating
530
Number of Pages

Part of Series

Nonviolence in America is a comprehensive compilation of first-hand sources that document the history of nonviolence in the United States from colonial times to the present. Editors Staughton and Alice Lynd bring together materials from diverse sources that illuminate a movement in American history that is sometimes assumed to have begun and ended with the anti-nuclear and civil rights struggles of the '50s and '60s but which is, in fact, older than the Republic itself. This revised and expanded edition of Nonviolence in America opens with writings of William Penn and John Woolman, of abolitionists like William Lloyd Garrison and Henry David Thoreau, and of anarchists Emma Goldman and William Haywood. It continues with testimonies of suffragettes and conscientious objectors of both World Wars, trade unionists and anti-nuclear activists. It includes classics such as Henry David Thoreau's "Civil Disobedience," William James' "The Moral Equivalent of War," and Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "Letter from Birmingham City Jail." Bringing Nonviolence in America right up to the present are writings on the Vietnam and Persian Gulf Wars, and the continuing struggles against nuclear power plants and weaponry and for preservation of the Earth and its peoples.

Avg Rating
3.91
Number of Ratings
34
5 STARS
26%
4 STARS
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3 STARS
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2 STARS
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1 STARS
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Author

Staughton Lynd
Staughton Lynd
Author · 11 books

The son of renowned sociologists Robert Staughton Lynd and Helen Lynd, Staughton Lynd grew up in New York City. He earned a BA from Harvard, an MA and PhD in history from Columbia. He taught at Spelman College in Georgia (where he was acquainted with Howard Zinn) and Yale University. In 1964, Lynd served as director of Freedom Schools in the Mississippi Summer Project. An opponent of the Vietnam War, Lynd chaired the first march against the war in Washington DC in 1965 and, along with Tom Hayden and Herbert Aptheker, went on a controversial trip to Hanoi in December 1965 that cost him his position at Yale. In the late 1960s Lynd moved to Chicago, where he was involved in community organizing. An oral history project of the working class undertaken with his wife inspired Lynd to earn a JD from the University of Chicago in 1976. After graduating the Lynds moved to Ohio, where Staughton worked as an attorney and activist.

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