"Most Americans first heard of Michael Harrington with the publication of The Other America, his seminal book on American poverty. Isserman expertly tracks Harrington's beginnings in the Catholic Worke"

American college students during the Age of Roosevelt confronted two of the gravest crises in the twentieth century: the Great Depression and the growing international tensions that ultimately led to World War II. These crises generated more idealism than despair, politicizing undergraduates, who built the first mass student movement in American history. Led by leftists, this movement responded to the crisis in international relations by organizing national student strikes against war and fascism - which at their height in the mid-1930s mobilized almost half of the undergraduate population in the United States. While battling for peace in the international arena, the student movement responded to the Depression in America by waging a war on poverty. The movement championed a broader and more egalitarian vision of the welfare state than that of the New Dealers. Demanding "scholarships not battleships," Depression-era student activists pushed for federal educational funding and job programs for all needy young Americans. The student movement tested the limits of free speech on campus. Anti-radical college administrators sought to suppress the movement, provoking major battles over political expression. Though Depression-era student protests were almost always nonviolent and lawful, college administrators nonetheless turned over confidential information about their activist students to the Federal Bureau of Investigation - abrogating the First Amendment rights of these young activists. When the Old Left Was Young offers the first comprehensive history of the Depression-era student movement and its activism on behalf of peace, social justice, and free speech. The study explores the role that radicals - and particularly Communists - played in launching and leading the movement. Avoiding the polemics of Cold War-era historiography, When the Old Left Was Young presents Communist students in all their complexity; they emerge on these pages as idealistic champions of egalitarian social change, but also as manipulative political organizers whose eagerness to serve as apologists for the U.S.S.R. ultimately destroyed the student movement in the wake of the Nazi-Soviet pact and the Soviet invasion of Finland. Based upon sources generally ignored by political historians, including student newspapers, university records, FBI documents, and interviews with movement leaders, this book offers new insights into American political life during the Depression era. Revealing fascinating individual stories in this history of student insurgency, When the Old Left Was Young will be of key interest to readers concerned with the history of American education, youth, radicalism, free speech, U.S. and Soviet foreign policy, race relations, and the Great Depression.

The Politics of the Texbook analyzes the factors that shape production, distribution and reception of school texts through original essays which emphasize the double-edged quality of textbooks. Textbooks are viewed as systems of moral regulation in the struggle of powerful groups to build political and cultural accord. They are also regarded as the site of popular resistance around discloding the interest underlying schoolknowledge and incorporating alternative traditions.

How "virtual adulthood"--children's role play in simulated cities, states, and nations--helped construct a new kind of "sheltered" childhood for American young people. A number of curious communities sprang up across the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century: simulated cities, states, and nations in which children played the roles of legislators, police officers, bankers, journalists, shopkeepers, and other adults. They performed real work--passing laws, growing food, and constructing buildings, among other tasks--inside virtual worlds. In this book, Jennifer Light examines the phenomena of "junior republics" and argues that they marked the transition to a new kind of "sheltered" childhood for American youth. Banished from the labor force and public life, children inhabited worlds that mirrored the one they had left. Light describes the invention of junior republics as independent institutions and how they were later established at schools, on playgrounds, in housing projects, and on city streets, as public officials discovered children's role playing helped their bottom line. The junior republic movement aligned with cutting-edge developmental psychology and educational philosophy, and complemented the era’s fascination with models and miniatures, shaping educational and recreational programs across the nation. Light’s account of how earlier generations distinguished "real life" from role playing reveals a hidden history of child labor in America and offers insights into the deep roots of such contemporary concepts as gamification, play labor, and virtuality.

In this provocative biographical portrait, Robert A. Gorman examines the political and intellectual life of this engaging radical thinker while looking ahead to the ways in which the work and example he has left us can affect political life in the twenty-first century. Michael Harrington's major attempt to Americanize socialism plays a big part in Gorman's analysis. He tells readers how it is possible to be both radical and patriotic and how an unjust system can be transformed without being destroyed.