W W Norton & Co Ltd

How do social movements arise, wield power and decline? Renowned scholar Linda Gordon investigates these questions in a ground-breaking work, narrating the stories of many of America’s most influential twentieth-century social movements. Beginning with the turn-of-the-century settlement house movement, Gordon then scrutinises the 1920s Ku Klux Klan and its successors, the violent American fascist groups of the 1930s. Profiles of two Depression-era movements follow—the Townsend campaign that brought us Social Security and the creation of unemployment aid. Proceeding then to the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott, which inspired the civil rights movement and launched Martin Luther King Jr.’s career, the narrative barrels into the 1960s–70s with Cesar Chavez’s farmworkers’ union. The concluding chapter illumines the 1970s women’s liberation movement through the dramatic story of the Boston-area organisations Bread and Roses and the Combahee River Collective. Separately and together, these seven chapters animate American history, reminding us of the power of collective activism.

We are told that the present moment bears a strong resemblance to Reconstruction, when freed-people and the federal government attempted to create an interracial democracy in the south after the American Civil War. That effort was overthrown and serves as a warning today about violent backlash to the mere idea of black equality. In The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic, acclaimed historian Manisha Sinha expands our view beyond the usual temporal and spatial bounds of Reconstruction (1865–1877) to explain how the American Civil War, the overthrow of Reconstruction, the conquest of the west, labour conflict in the north, Chinese exclusion, women’s suffrage and the establishment of an overseas American empire were part of the same struggle between the forces of democracy and those of reaction. Highlighting the critical role of black people in redefining American citizenship and governance, Sinha’s book shows that Reconstruction laid the foundation of our democracy.