By W. J. Rorabaugh (NHC Fellow, 1983–84) Berkeley, California stood at the center of the political, social, and cultural upheaval that made the 1960s a unique period in American history. In Berkeley at War, W.J. Rorabaugh, who attended the graduate school of the University of California at Berkeley in the 1970s, presents a lively, informative account … Continued
By Elizabeth Otto (NHC Fellow, 2017–18) The Bauhaus (1919–1933) is widely regarded as the twentieth century's most influential art, architecture, and design school, celebrated as the archetypal movement of rational modernism and famous for bringing functional and elegant design to the masses. In Haunted Bauhaus, art historian Elizabeth Otto liberates Bauhaus history, uncovering a movement … Continued
By Andrew Cayton (NHC Fellow, 2012–13) In 1798, English essayist and novelist William Godwin ignited a transatlantic scandal with Memoirs of the Author of "A Vindication of the Rights of Woman." Most controversial were the details of the romantic liaisons of Godwin's wife, Mary Wollstonecraft, with both American Gilbert Imlay and Godwin himself. Wollstonecraft's life and writings … Continued
By James A. Epstein (NHC Fellow, 1985–86) Radical Expression explores a set of related themes dealing with popular radical language, ideology and communication in England and reexamines the rhetoric of popular constitutionalism and the associated repertoire of constitutionalist mobilization. Despite the impulses of the French revolution, popular constitutionalism remained the dominant idiom within which radicals … Continued
Edited by Daphne Patai (NHC Fellow, 1990–91) and Angela Ingram Rediscovering Forgotten Radicals reintroduces the work of writers and activists whose texts, and often whose very lives, were passionately engaged in the major political issues of their times but who have been displaced from both the historical and the literary record. Focusing on seventeen writers whose … Continued
Bayard Rustin was twentieth century America’s great radical voice. His vision contained multitudes, fusing labor rights, racial justice, sexual equality, socialism, and pacifism. He may well have been America’s first intersectional radical. But in the 1960s, Rustin’s attempt to weave the strands of his activism together into a broad-based program for transformative change fell victim … Continued