Books

Designed to highlight Zinn’s most important writings, The Indispensable Zinn includes excerpts from Zinn’s bestselling A People’s History of the United States; his memoir, You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train; his inspiring writings on the civil rights movement; and the full text of his celebrated play Marx in Soho. Noted historian and activist Timothy Patrick McCarthy provides essential historical and biographical context for each selection.

With an introduction from Zinn’s former Spellman College student and longtime friend Alice Walker and an afterword by Zinn’s friend and colleague Noam Chomsky, The Indispensable Zinn is both a fitting tribute to the legacy of a man whose “work changed the way millions of people saw the past” (Noam Chomsky) and a powerful and accessible introduction for anyone discovering Zinn for the first time.

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Protest Nation is a guide through the speeches, letters, broadsides, essays, and manifestos that form the backbone of this tradition-a much more accessible trade edition of The Radical Reader, which was published for the academy. Here are the words—from socialists, feminists, union organizers, civil-rights workers, gay and lesbian activists, and environmentalists—that have served as beacons for millions. Their radical arguments and ideas are links in a chain reaching from the present back through decades of radical thinking and movement-building.

Brief introductory essays by the editors provide a rich biographical and historical context for each selection included. Protest Nation presents the most significant and brilliant examples of radical writing, in a concise volume geared for anyone interested in reconnecting with the deep currents of American radical thinking. These range from a fiery speech by Eugene Debs, the great socialist orator; to the original Black Panther Party Platform; to Peter Singer’s astonishing treatise on animal liberation, among many others.

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Timothy Patrick McCarthy,
The Radical Reader: A Documentary History of the American Radical Tradition

March 21, 2003 (The New Press)

Co-edited and with an introduction by Timothy Patrick McCarthy and John McMillian
Foreword by Eric Foner

The first book of its kind, The Radical Reader brings together the most comprehensive collection ever assembled of the writings of America's native radical tradition. From Thomas Paine's Common Sense to Kate Millett's “Sexual Politics,” these are the major documents that sparked, guided, and distilled some of the most influential movements in American history.

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Timothy Patrick McCarthy,
Prophets of Protest: Reconsidering the History of American Abolitionism

March 29, 2006 (the New Press)

Co-edited and with an introduction by Timothy Patrick McCarthy and John Stauffer
Foreword by Michael Fellman
Afterword by Martin Duberman

The campaign to abolish slavery in the United States was the most powerful and effective social movement of the nineteenth century and has served as a recurring source of inspiration. The first major reexamination of American abolitionism in more than a generation, Prophets of Protest marks an ambitious attempt to consider the movement from an integrated, interdisciplinary perspective. It is a long overdue update of our historical understanding of one of the central social movements in American history.

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There are more slaves in the world today than at any time in human history. After spending four years visiting a dozen countries where slavery flourishes, Ben Skinner tells the story, in gripping narrative style, of individuals who live in slavery, those who have escaped from bondage, those who own or traffic in slaves, and the mixed political motives of those who seek to combat the crime. Skinner does for modern bondage what Samantha Power and Philip Gourevitch have done for genocide. Never before has contemporary slavery been portrayed with such haunting proximity. By bearing witness for the slaves themselves, Skinner has written one of the most morally courageous books of our time, one that will long linger in the conscience of those who encounter and seek to abolish this monstrous crime.

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In this first-of-its-kind book, Siddharth Kara investigates the mechanics of the global sex trafficking industry across four continents and takes stock of its devastating human toll. Since first encountering the horrors of sexual slavery in a Bosnian refugee camp in 1995, Kara has taken multiple research trips to India, Nepal, Burma, Thailand, Vietnam, the United Kingdom, Italy, the Netherlands, Albania, Moldova, Mexico, and the United States. He has met hundreds of slaves, has witnessed the sale of numerous human beings into slavery, and has confronted some of the criminals who have exploited them. Drawing on his background in finance and economics, Kara provides a rare business analysis of sex trafficking, focusing on the local drivers and global macroeconomic trends that gave rise to the industry. Kara supplements his analysis with a riveting account of this unconscionable industry, and concludes with a proposal for aggressive measures to abolish the global practice of sex slavery.

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