Radicals in America is a masterful history of controversial dissenters who pursued greater equality, freedom and democracy - and transformed the nation. Written with clarity and verve, Radicals in America shows how radical leftists, while often marginal or ostracized, could assume a catalytic role as effective organizers in mass movements, fostering the imagination of alternative futures. Beginning with the Second World War, Radicals in America extends all the way down to the present, making it the first comprehensive history of radicalism to reach beyond the sixties. From the Communist Party and the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, its coverage extends to the Battle of Seattle and Occupy Wall Street. Each chapter begins with a particular life story, including a Harlem woman deported in the McCarthy era, a gay Japanese-American opponent of the Vietnam War, and a Native American environmentalist, vignettes that bring to life the personal within the political.
Reviews 117 Congdon only hints at the complex (and in this last case, truly Oedipal) ties between the two generations. These, along with the differences in their respective defining experience visa -vis communism might offer a clue to their very different stand on it. While the first generation encountered communism in its brief Hungarian incarnation as the utopian episode of the 1919 Republic of Councils, the second generation had come of age during the feverish postwar years of a new, democratic Hungary, followed by the Soviet-controlled comrnunist takeover. And despite the anti-democratic nature of the new communist regime, they deeply identified with the large-scale social and cultural revolution it brought about, not to mention that they owed it their own ascendance to the political and academic elite. This may be the reason why all three representatives of the second generation remained committed to the idea of a democratic socialism. In this book, as before, Lee Congdon displays a mastery of his subject, including the most arcane details of Hungarian political and intellectual history in the twentieth century. His insistence, however, that intellectuals worthy of that name are driven solely by the desire to find faith is curious, given the degree to which it limits the freedom of the intellectual historian to draw his own conclusions. It feels artificially drafted onto this multi-generational and multidimensional study whose rich biographical and intellectual details and loose ends alike provide much food for thought and will hopefully generate further debate.
This article engages the controversy over whether Malcolm Little, who would become Malcolm X, had same-sexual encounters. A minute sifting of all evidence and claims, augmented by new findings, yields strong indication that Malcolm Little did take part in sex acts with male counterparts. If set in the context of the 1930s and 1940s, these acts position him not as a "homosexual lover," as has been asserted, but in the pattern of "straight trade"-heterosexual men open to sex with homosexuals-an understanding that in turn affords insights into the black revolutionary's mature masculinity.
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