American Protest Literature (John Harvard Library) - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0674023528 ISBN 13: 9780674023529

Publisher: Belknap Press, 2006

Synopsis

“I like a little rebellion now and then”—so wrote Thomas Jefferson to Abigail Adams, enlisting in a tradition that throughout American history has led writers to rage and reason, prophesy and provoke. This is the first anthology to collect and examine an American literature that holds the nation to its highest ideals, castigating it when it falls short and pointing the way to a better collective future.

American Protest Literature presents sources from eleven protest movements—political, social, and cultural—from the Revolution to abolition to gay rights to antiwar protest. Each section reprints documents from the original phase of the movement as well as evidence of its legacy in later times. Informative headnotes place the selections in historical context and draw connections with other writings within the anthology and beyond. Sources include a wide variety of genres—pamphlets, letters, speeches, sermons, legal documents, poems, short stories, photographs, posters—and a range of voices from prophetic to outraged to sorrowful, from U.S. Presidents to the disenfranchised. Together they provide an enlightening and inspiring survey of this most American form of literature.

About this title

About the Author:

Zoe Trodd is a member of the Tutorial Board in History and Literature, Harvard University.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

"Ultimately, protest literature should move people to think more broadly, feel more deeply, and begin to act; perhaps alone at first, but then with others. It works on the supposition that social change comes through the combined and cumulative actions of many people, even if they do not know one another or are not aware of one another's existence. . . . Protest literature says to the reader, have hope—you are not alone." --From the Afterword by Howard Zinn
--Howard Zinn

About this edition

• Publisher: Belknap Press
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 0674023528
• ISBN 13: 9780674023529
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 576
• Editor: Trodd Zoe