This book examines the development of the concept of intellectual property in the United States during the nineteenth century.

Declaration of Human Rights.

The rise of black radicalism in the 1960s was a result of both the successes and the failures of the civil rights movement. The movement's victories were inspirational, but its failures to bring about structural political and economic change pushed many to look elsewhere for new strategies. During this era of intellectual ferment, the writers, editors, and activists behind the monthly magazine Liberator (1960–71) were essential contributors to the debate. In the first full-length history of the organization that produced the magazine, Christopher M. Tinson locates the Liberator as a touchstone of U.S.-based black radical thought and organizing in the 1960s. Combining radical journalism with on-the-ground activism, the magazine was dedicated to the dissemination of a range of cultural criticism aimed at spurring political activism, and became the publishing home to many notable radical intellectual-activists of the period, such as Larry Neal, Ossie Davis, Ruby Dee, Harold Cruse, and Askia Toure. By mapping the history and intellectual trajectory of the Liberator and its thinkers, Tinson traces black intellectual history beyond black power and black nationalism into an internationalism that would shape radical thought for decades to come.

"Senior co-administrator of the Norcoast Salmon Research Facility, Dr. Mackenzie Connor - Mac to her friends and colleagues - was a biologist who had wanted nothing more out of life than to study the spawning habits of salmon. But that was before she met Brymn, the first member of the Dhryn race ever to set foot on Earth. And it was before Base was attacked, and Mac's friend and fellow scientist Dr. Emily Mamani was kidnapped by the mysterious race known as the Ro." "From that moment on everything changed for Mac, for Emily, for Brymn, for the human race, and for all the many member races of the Interspecies Union." "Now, with the alien Dhryn following an instinct-driven migratory path through the inhabited spaceways - bringing about the annihilation of sentient races who have the misfortune to lie along the star trail they are following - time is running out not only for the human race but for all life forms." "And only Mac and her disparate band of researchers - drawn from many of the races that are members of the Interspecies Union - stand any chance of solving the deadly puzzle of the Dhryn and the equally enigmatic Ro."--BOOK JACKET.

"We Are All Leaders" describes a kind of union qualitatively different from the bureaucratic business unions that make up the AFL-CIO today. From African American nutpickers in St. Louis, chemical and rubber workers in Akron, textile workers in the South, and bootleg miners in Pennsylvania to tenant farmers in the Mississippi Delta, packinghouse and garment workers in Minnesota, seamen in San Francisco, and labor party campaigns throughout the country, workers in the 1930s were experimenting with community-based unionism. Contributors to this volume draw on interviews with participants in the events described, first-person narratives, trade union documents, and other primary sources to tell what workers of the 1930s did. The alternative unionism of the 1930s was democratic, deeply rooted in mutual aid among workers in different crafts and work sites, and politically independent. The key to it was a value system based on egalitarianism. The cry, "We are all leaders " resonated among rank-and-file activists. Their struggle, often ignored by historians, has much to teach us today about union organizing. CONTRIBUTORS: Rosemary Feurer, Peter Rachleff, Janet Irons, Mark D. Naison, Eric Leif Davin, Elizabeth Faue, Michael Kozura, John Borsos, Stan Weir A volume in the series The Working Class in American History, edited by David Brody, Alice Kessler-Harris, David Montgomery, and Sean Wilenz

This is the first study to provide a comprehensive picture of the revolt brought about by American radical historians in the 1960s and 1970s. With the turbulent sixties as a backdrop, the work of radical luminaries like Eugene Genovese, Herbert Gutman, Staughton Lynd, William Appleman Williams and Howard Zinn is discussed. These historians made a significant contribution to present-day notions about slavery, working-class history, the New Deal, the Cold War and a wealth of other subjects. Their main target was American liberalism. Radical criticism centered on the liberal concepts of the division of power and of the nature of man. The acrimonious debate which ensued tore the historical profession apart. Therefore most historians have stressed the disagreements between liberals and radicals. Yet, in this study it will be argued that in some respects the radicals were part and parcel of mainstream historiography, though they presented a radical version of it.

What causes a generation of intellectuals to switch its political allegiances--in particular, to move from the opposition to the mainstream? In U.S. history, it is the experience of the "Old Left" intellectuals, who swung from avowal of socialism or Communism in the 1930s to apology for American liberalism in the 1950s, that raises this question pointedly. In this highly original and broadsweeping study, Howard Brick focuses on the career of Daniel Bell as an illustrative case of political transformation, combining intellectual history, biography, and the history of sociology to explain Bell's emerging thought in terms of the tensions between socialists and sociological theory. The resulting work will be of compelling interest to Marxists and American intellectual historians, to sociologists, and to all students of twentieth-century American thought and culture. Daniel Bell's route to political reconciliation was a tortuous one. While it is common wisdom to cite World War II as the force that welded national unity and brought Depression-era radicals to an appreciation of democratic institutions, the war actually turned the young Bell to the left. Opposing the centralized power of American business and military elites at war's end, Bell shared the "new radicalism" that infused Dwight MacDonald's Politics Magazine and motivated C. Wright Mills' early work. Nonetheless, by the early 1950s, Bell had declared the demise of American socialism and endorsed the welfare reforms of the Fair Deal. Brick's study finds, however, that the "new radicalism" of the mid-1940s helped to shape Bell's mature perspective, giving it a richness and critical edge often unrecognized. Brick finds that the heritage of modernism, as manifested in social theory, knit together the process of political transformation, combining disdain for the false promises of liberal progress, estrangement from society at large, and reconciliation with a reality perceived to be full of unconquerable tensions. Brick locates the foundations of Bell's mature social theory in the historical context of his early work--particularly in the political concessions made by the social-democratic movement, in the face of the Cold War, to the reconstruction of capitalist order in the West. The crucial turning point, in World politics as in Bell's thinking, can be located in the years 1947-49. After that point, the different strands of Bell's thinking came together to represent the contradictions in the perspective of a social democrat trapped by the "iron cage" of capitalism, who saw in his political accommodation both the road to progress and the rupture of his hopes. This peculiar paradigm, shaped by the experiences of deradicalization, lies at the heart of Daniel Bell's social theory, Brick finds. At the present critical point in American history, as a new generation of leftist intellectuals undergoes a process similar to that of Bell's generation, Brick's work will be especially important in understanding the historical phenomenon of deradicalization.

“A truly excellent contribution that unearths new and largely unknown evidence about relationships between Puerto Ricans and African-Americans and white Americans in the continental United States and Puerto Rico. Alamo-Pastrana revises how race is to be studied and understood across national, cultural, colonial, and hierarchical cultural relations.”—Zaire Zenit Dinzey-Flores, author of Locked In, Locked Out: Gated Communities in a Puerto Rican City Puerto Rico’s colonial relationship with the United States and its history of intermixture of native, African, and Spanish inhabitants has prompted inconsistent narratives about race and power in the colonial territory. Departing from these accounts, early twentieth-century writers, journalists, and activists scrutinized both Puerto Rico’s and the United States’s institutionalized racism and colonialism in an attempt to spur reform, leaving an archive of oft-overlooked political writings. In Seams of Empire, Carlos Alamo-Pastrana uses racial imbrication as a framework for reading this archive of little-known Puerto Rican, African American, and white American radicals and progressives, both on the island and the continental United States. By addressing the concealed power relations responsible for national, gendered, and class differences, this method of textual analysis reveals key symbolic and material connections between marginalized groups in both national spaces and traces the complexity of race, racism, and conflict on the edges of empire.

Reflecting critically on the discipline of African American studies is a complicated undertaking. Making sense of the black American experience requires situating it within the larger cultural, political-economic, and ideological dynamics that shape American life. This volume moves away from privileging racial commonality as the fulcrum of inquiry and moves toward observing the quality of the accounts scholars have rendered of black American life. This book maps the changing conditions of black political practice and experience from Emancipation to Obama with excursions into the Jim Crow era, Black Power radicalism, and the Reagan revolt. Here are essays, classic and new, that define historically and conceptually discrete problems affecting black Americans as these problems have been shaped by both politics and scholarly fashion. A key goal of the book is to come to terms with the changing terrain of American life in view of major Civil Rights court decisions and legislation.