LitArk » Books » Politics

Paul Lyons - The People of This Generation: The Rise and Fall of the New Left in Philadelphia

Here you can read online Paul Lyons - The People of This Generation: The Rise and Fall of the New Left in Philadelphia full text of the book (entire story) in english for free. Download pdf and epub, get meaning, cover and reviews about this ebook. year: 2013, publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press, genre: Politics. Description of the work, (preface) as well as reviews are available. Best literature library LitArk.com created for fans of good reading and offers a wide selection of genres:

Romance novel Science fiction Adventure Detective Science History Home and family Prose Art Politics Computer Non-fiction Religion Business Children Humor

Choose a favorite category and find really read worthwhile books. Enjoy immersion in the world of imagination, feel the emotions of the characters or learn something new for yourself, make an fascinating discovery.

Book:
The People of This Generation: The Rise and Fall of the New Left in Philadelphia
Author:
Paul Lyons
Publisher:
University of Pennsylvania Press
Genre:
Books / Politics
Year:
2013
Rating:
3 / 5
Favourites:
Add to favourites
Your mark:
- 60
- 1
- 2
- 3
- 4
- 5

Description
Author's other books
Similar books

The People of This Generation: The Rise and Fall of the New Left in Philadelphia: summary, description and annotation

We offer to read an annotation, description, summary or preface (depends on what the author of the book "The People of This Generation: The Rise and Fall of the New Left in Philadelphia" wrote himself). If you haven't found the necessary information about the book — write in the comments, we will try to find it.

At the heart of the tumult that marked the 1960s was the unprecedented scale of student protest on university campuses around the world. Identifying themselves as the New Left, as distinguished from the Old Left socialists who engineered the historic labor protests of the 1930s, these young idealists quickly became the voice and conscience of their generation.
The People of This Generation is the first comprehensive case study of the history of the New Left in a Northeast urban environment. Paul Lyons examines how campus and community activists interacted with the urban political environment, especially the pacifist Quaker tradition and the rising ethnic populism of police chief and later mayor Frank Rizzo. Moving away from the memoirs and overviews that have dominated histories of the period, Lyons uses this detailed metropolitan study as a prism for revealing the New Lefts successes and failures and for gauging how the energy generated by local activism cultivated the allegiance of countless citizens.
Lyons explores why groups dominated by the Old Left had limited success in offering inspiration to a new generation driven by the civil rights movement and opposition to the Vietnam War. The number and diversity of colleges in this unique metropolitan area allow for rich comparisons of distinctly different campus cultures, and Lyons shows how both student demographics and institutional philosophies determined the pace and trajectory of radicalization. Turning his attention off campus, Lyons highlights the significance of the antiwar Philadelphia Resistance and the antiracist People for Human RightsPhiladelphias most significant New Left organizationsrevealing that the New Left was influenced by both its urban and campus milieus.
Combining in-depth archival research, rich personal anecdote, insightful treatment of the ideals that propelled student radicalism, and careful attention to the varied groups that nurtured it, The People of This Generation offers a moving history of urban America during what was perhaps the most turbulent decade in living memory.

Paul Lyons: author's other books

Who wrote The People of This Generation: The Rise and Fall of the New Left in Philadelphia? Find out the surname, the name of the author of the book and a list of all author's works by series.

The People of This Generation: The Rise and Fall of the New Left in Philadelphia — read online for free the complete book (whole text) full work

Below is the text of the book, divided by pages. System saving the place of the last page read, allows you to conveniently read the book "The People of This Generation: The Rise and Fall of the New Left in Philadelphia" online for free, without having to search again every time where you left off. Put a bookmark, and you can go to the page where you finished reading at any time.

Light

Font size:

↓

↑

Reset

Interval:

↓

↑

Bookmark:

Make

The People of This Generation

The Rise and Fall of the New Left in Philadelphia

PAUL LYONS

Copyright 2003 University of Pennsylvania Press All rights reserved Printed - photo 2

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Published by

University of Pennsylvania Press

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4011

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Lyons, Paul, 1942-

The people of this generation : the rise and fall of the New Left in Philadelphia / Paul Lyons.

p. cm.

ISBN 0-8122-3715-3 (acid-free paper)

Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.

1. New leftPennsylvaniaPhiladelphiaHistory. 2. College studentsPennsylvaniaPhiladelphiaPolitical activityHistory20th century. 3. RadicalismPennsylvaniaPhiladelphiaHistory20th century. 4. Philadelphia (Pa.)Politics and government20th century. I. Title

F158.52.L96 2003

320.53/09748/1109045dc21

2002043043

This ones for
LULA

Contents

Introduction: The Movement and the City of Brotherly Love

The 1960s: Post-Cold War and Post-Memoir

In the early 1960s a new generations voice would emerge across the nation, responding to the kinds of themes highlighted in Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) Port Huron Statement of 1962: the threat of nuclear confrontation, the contradictions between American affluence and minority and Third World poverty, the contradictions between American commitments to equality and inclusion and the ugly realities of racism and segregation, and the sense that suburban affluence rested on a mix of hypocrisy, alienation, and meaninglessness. In Philadelphia, that New Left voice would face a number of challenges, some held in common with movement activists nationwide, others specific to this city. First of all, it would need to come to grips with the host of older radical voices that were struggling to recover from the dual blows of McCarthyist assault and the failures of Communism with the invasion of Hungary and the revelations of Stalins crimes by Nikita Khrushchev at the Twentieth Party Congress in 1956.

I begin with the assumption that one must examine the social and political movements of the 1960swhat participants characteristically called the movementin the context of their geographic, political, and cultural environments. Of course, many movement efforts were focused not on local but rather on national and global issues, especially when the United States entered the war in Vietnam. But a movement that sought a broader and deeper democracy, at least until the late 1960s, must be evaluated in terms of how it sought to extend the boundaries of liberty, fraternity, and equality within its broadly defined community. Too often, accounts of the New Left have emphasized intent and what some call expressive politicswhat one sought to accomplish and how one felt in the effort. It is important to examine these goals within the narrower confines of particular college and university campuses. But it is also essential to consider what kinds of effects this eruption of youthful idealism and Utopian dreams had on the politics and culture of the broader local community. I examine such fundamental questions in the following chapters.

Writing about the 1960s has been affected by two fundamental changes. The first is more obvious: the initial rush of personal accounts, memoirs, and histories, written by people who were participant-observers, has been augmented by the efforts of younger and less personally involved historians, often doing groundbreaking work in disaggregating the period through a case study approach. As such, we now are benefiting from studies of particular campuses, including those which were out of the media spotlight, outside the bicoastal centers, and perhaps more representative than elite schools such as Berkeley and Harvard, which have often received the most attention.

Second, we have now entered the twenty-first century and have some perspective in looking back at events that occurred nearly half a After all, it is quite reasonable to suggest that the Utopian challenges associated with the 1960s are part of a piece with the tragic nightmare that was Communism. There were enough events and episodes, from the Weathermen to the legacy of political correctness, to justify such associations. However, the disenchantment, the sobering brought about by the failures, both economic and moral, of the Marxist-Leninist enterprise, must not be allowed to reduce the distinctive qualities of the 1960s movements to Cold War-style caricature. What remains to be constructed is a nuanced portrait sensitive to the inevitable contradictions inherent in movements for social change and comprehensive enough to consider their destructive dimensions without devaluing their distinctive contributions to social justice and human betterment.

What historians need to do is reexamine those movements and that erathe New Left and the 1960swith the greater knowledge, empirical and moral, that this short century of totalitarianism and war has yielded. But we must also take into consideration those aspects of the twentieth century in general and of the 1960s in particular that have in some ways increased the amount of freedom, democracy, and ability to pursue happiness, that is, enabling Americans to live longer but also better, to live more freely, more democratically, more inclusively. And some of those benefits require an appreciative examination, certainly not an inquisition, of 1960s movements that helped open the doors of opportunity to African Americans, women, gays and lesbians, and a wide array of other historically mistreated groups. Conservative jurist Richard A. Posner, in criticizing the notion that everything since the 1960s has been moral decay, reminds us that todays culture does not ridicule obese people, ethnic minorities, stammerers and effeminate men, as the popular culture of the 1950s did, so it may be doubted whether there has actually been a net decline in the moral tone of popular culture. For those who blame the movements of the 1960s for a precipitous moral degeneration, Posner emphasizes the increased tolerance for people different from the norm, whether in race, religion, sex, sexual orientation or even physical and mental health (no more moron jokes), concluding that this will strike most people as moral progress.

Liberal Consensus and Utopian Challenges, Left and Right

I believe that future historians will look back at the 1960s and its social movements as a critical indicator of the crisis of modern liberalism. In the 1950s and early 1960s most serious commentators assumed that we, not only the United States but also the rest of the developed world and eventually the entire globe, were part of an inexorable process of modernization which required the patchwork, piecemeal strengths of a mixed economy, part capitalist, part planned, and appropriately called a welfare state. Yes, the United States lagged behind our more sophisticated Western European alliesthere would be a later version involving Japan in the 1970s and 1980sbut the Kennedy-Johnson years were to help us catch up in the achievement of what LBJ grandly called the Great Society. Not everyone celebrated this anticipated construction; the Left still dreamed of some kind of workers state, usually some democratic version of socialism. More powerfully, there were Weberians of various sorts, concerned with the bureaucratization of human life itself, haunted by the possibilities of evil as banal, critical of the little houses made of ticky-tacky, the men in gray flannel suits, the organization men, the wasteland of popular culture. But few projected fundamental alternatives; most, in effect, hoped for a Europeanization of American culture. Such critics flocked to the films of Luis Bunuel, Franois Truffaut, Ingmar Bergman and Federico Fellini, which seemed to embody these yearnings for both authenticity and sophistication.

Light

Font size:

↓

↑

Reset

Interval:

↓

↑

Bookmark:

Make

Similar books «The People of This Generation: The Rise and Fall of the New Left in Philadelphia»

Look at similar books to The People of This Generation: The Rise and Fall of the New Left in Philadelphia. We have selected literature similar in name and meaning in the hope of providing readers with more options to find new, interesting, not yet read works.

Raina Lipsitz

The Rise of a New Left: How Young Radicals Are Shaping the Future of American Politics

Robert C. Cottrell

All-American Rebels: The American Left from the Wobblies to Today

Paul Cronin

A Time to Stir: Columbia 68

Matthew R. Kerbel

Next Generation Netroots: Realignment and the Rise of the Internet Left

Harihar Bhattacharyya

Radical Politics and Governance in Indias North East: The Case of Tripura

William E Lyons

The Politics of Dissatisfaction: Citizens, Services and Urban Institutions: Citizens, Services and Urban Institutions

Laura Warren Hill

Strike the Hammer: The Black Freedom Struggle in Rochester, New York, 1940–1970

University of Wisconsin

Cold War university: Madison and the New Left in the sixties

Jonathan A. Rodden

Why cities lose: the deep roots of the urban-rural political divide

Óscar García Agustín

Left-Wing Populism: The Politics of the People

Chantal Mouffe

For a Left Populism

Paul Lyons

New Left, new right, and the legacy of the Sixties

Reviews about «The People of This Generation: The Rise and Fall of the New Left in Philadelphia»

Discussion, reviews of the book The People of This Generation: The Rise and Fall of the New Left in Philadelphia and just readers' own opinions. Leave your comments, write what you think about the work, its meaning or the main characters. Specify what exactly you liked and what you didn't like, and why you think so.