Category: Books

Stayed on Freedom

“The Black Power movement, often associated with its iconic spokesmen, derived much of its energy from the work of people whose stories have never been told. Stayed on Freedom brings into focus two unheralded Black Power activists who dedicated their lives to the fight for freedom.

Zoharah Simmons and Michael Simmons fell in love while organizing tenants and workers in the South. Their commitment to each other and to social change took them on a decades-long journey that traversed first the country and then the world. In centering their lives, historian Dan Berger shows how Black Power united the local and the global across organizations and generations.

Based on hundreds of hours of interviews, Stayed on Freedom is a moving and intimate portrait of two people trying to make a life while working to make a better world.  “

Remaking Radicalism

This book brings together documents from multiple radical movements in the recent United States from 1973 through 2001. These years are typically viewed as an era of neoliberalism, dominated by conservative retrenchment, the intensified programs of privatization and incarceration, dramatic cuts to social welfare, and the undermining of labor, antiracist, and feminist advances. Yet activists from the period proved tenacious in the face of upheaval, resourceful in creating new tactics, and dedicated to learning from one another. Persistent and resolute, activists did more than just keep radical legacies alive. They remade radicalism–bridging differences of identity and ideology often assumed to cleave movements, grappling with the eradication of liberal promises, and turning to movement cultures as the source of a just future.

Remaking Radicalism is the first anthology of U.S. radicalisms that reveals the depth, diversity, and staying power of social movements after the close of the long 1960s. Editors Dan Berger and Emily Hobson track the history of popular struggles during a time that spans the presidencies of Richard Nixon and George W. Bush and bring to readers the political upheavals that shaped the end of the century and that continue to define the present.

Concrete Mama

A book-length photoessay of life, labor, sexuality, and politics inside Washington’s notorious Walla Walla prison. First published in 1981, Dan Berger’s introduction to this long out-of-print classic situates the book in its time period–and what it means in an era of mass incarceration.

Rethinking the American Prison Movement

A short, accessible overview of the strikes, lawsuits, uprisings, writings, and diverse coalitions with free-world allies that incarcerated people have used to contest their confinement from the nineteenth century forced labor camps to contemporary portests against mass incarceration.

Captive Nation

A bold reconsideration of twentieth century black activism, the prison system, and the origins of mass incarceration.

The Struggle Within

A primer on the incarceration of activists from Black Power, Puerto Rican independence, environmental and other radical movements.

The Hidden 1970s

An anthology devoted to the complex and diverse histories of left-wing social movements in an overlooked time period–and how they continue to shape American political culture.

Outlaws of America

A narrative history of the Weather Underground, based on unprecedented interviews with former members and others, of the legendary anti-imperialist revolutionary organization of the 1970s that locates its lasting influence in the “politics of solidarity.”