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Book Review
| The New Left Revisited. Ed. by John McMillian and Paul Buhle. (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2003. vi, 274 pp. Cloth, $79.50, ISBN 1-56639-975-0. Paper, $24.95, ISBN 1-56639-976-9.)
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| This is an exciting anthology but a frustrating one. The fourteen contributors aim not merely to "revisit" the history of radicalism during the 1960s but to rewrite it in significant ways. With a blend of brief monographs and analytical overviews, they seek to challenge what John McMillian calls the reigning narrative of the New Left. This storywhich has been told by such talented memoirists and historians as Todd Gitlin, Jim Miller, and Clayborne Carsondwells on the rise and fall of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). |
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The essayists first refuse to separate the counterculture from the political radicalism of the period. They maintain that the larger rebellion, what Herbert Marcuse called the great refusal, had consequences more far-reaching and salutary than the earlier interpreters believed. Second, the contributors, using the methods of social history, argue that regional distinctions and gender dynamics shaped local movements more decisively than anything national leaders and organizations said and did. |
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