Encyclopedia Of The American Left

The first comprehensive reference book on radicalism in the United States from the Civil War to the present, this work fills serious gaps in basic reference materials on American politics, labor, and culture by focusing on radicals rather than reformers. Merging previously unutilized sourcessuch as oral history with the wealth of insight available from feminist, ethnic, racial studies and popular culture analysis as well as traditional scholarly approaches, their efforts retrieved a hitherto inaccesible history.

First Published in 2004. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Although the distinction between the politics of the left and the right is commonly assumed in the media and in treatments of political science and history, the terms are used so loosely that the student and the general reader are often confused: What exactly are the terms left and right supposed to imply? This two-volume Encyclopedia of Politics: The Left and the Right contains over 450 articles on individuals, movements, political parties, and ideological principles, with those usually thought of as left in the left-hand volume (Volume 1), and those considered on the right in the right-hand volume (Volume 2).

Presents a complete reference guide to American political parties and elections, including an A-Z listing of presidential elections with terms, people and events involved in the process.

“A must-own title.” —National Review Online American Conservatism: An Encyclopedia is the first comprehensive reference volume to cover what is surely the most influential political and intellectual movement of the past half century. More than fifteen years in the making—and more than half a million words in length—this informative and entertaining encyclopedia contains substantive entries on those persons, events, organizations, and concepts of major importance to postwar American conservatism. Its contributors include iconic patriarchs of the conservative and libertarian movements, celebrated scholars, well-known authors, and influential movement activists and leaders. Ranging from “abortion” to “Zoll, Donald Atwell,” and written from viewpoints as various as those which have informed the postwar conservative movement itself, the encyclopedia’s more than 600 entries will orient readers of all kinds to the people and ideas that have given shape to contemporary American conservatism. This long-awaited volume is not to be missed.

David Horowitz spent the first part of his life in the world of the Communist-progressive left, a politics he inherited from his mother and father, and later in the New Left as one of its founders. When the wreckage he and his comrades had created became clear to him in the mid-1970s, he left. Three decades of second thoughts then made him this movement’s principal intellectual antagonist. “For better or worse,” as Horowitz writes in the preface, “I have been condemned to spend the rest of my days attempting to understand how the left pursues the agendas from which I have separated myself, and why.” When Horowitz began his odyssey, the left had already escaped the political ghetto to which his parents’ generation and his own had been confined. Today, it has become the dominant force in America’s academic and media cultures, electing a president and achieving a position from which it can shape America’s future. How it achieved its present success and what that success portends are the overarching subjects of Horowitz’s conservative writings. Through the unflinching focus of one singularly engaged witness, the identity of a destructive movement that constantly morphs itself in order to conceal its identity and mission becomes disturbingly clear. Horowitz reflects on the years he spent at war with his own country, collaborating with and confronting radical figures like Huey Newton, Tom Hayden and Billy Ayers, as he made his transition from what the writer Paul Berman described as the American left’s “most important theorist” to its most determined enemy.

With intense passion and commitment, labor reformers and Communist Party activists Grace Hutchins and Anna Rochester dedicated themselves both to the cause of economic justice and to each other. Janet Lee traces Hutchins and Rochester's extraordinary ideological journey from Christianity to Communism in this engaging joint biography, regendering the history of the intellectual left at the same time that she shares the interwoven life stories of these remarkable women. This is a biography that explores the complex and multiple contexts that produced Hutchins and Rochester as political subjects and focuses on the tensions and contradictions of their public and private lives. Methodologically ground breaking, Comrades and Partners attempts to disrupt the realist frame of research and writing in relation to both subject and author: subject in terms of the myth of an unfolding, coherent self and author in terms of highlighting the boundaries between fact and fiction. Lee has produced an invaluable addition to the study of women's history, a volume which will prove indespensible to scholars of history, gender studies, and the postmodern approach.