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Robin M. Morris

Goldwater Girls to Reagan Women is a statewide study of women’s part in the history of conservatism, the New Right, and the Republican Party in the state of Georgia. Robin M. Morris examines how the growth of the Republican Party in the 1960s and 1970s was due in large part to the political activism of white women. The book begins with the African American women who established the Georgia Federation of Republican Women and follows how they lost the organization and the party to white women moving to the Sunbelt South. Conservative white women developed a language and strategy of family values that they deployed to battle school busing, defeat the Equal Rights Amendment, and elect Republican leaders even in Jimmy Carter’s home state.

Morris uses original interviews and archival research in personal papers of women activists in the Georgia New Right movement, including Lee Ague Miller, Beth Callaway, Kathryn Dunaway, Lee Wysong, and Hattie Greene, to reveal the motivations and actions that transformed the state from blue to red. In this era, perceived threats to family life and traditional values spurred women-led grassroots organization that enabled broad political shifts on the state level. Conservative women carved out their political niche as they consolidated and expanded their power and influence. Rather than a male-dominated, top-down approach, Morris centers her historical account on the middle-class white women whose actions changed the political landscape of the state and ultimately the country.

University of Georgia Press

Since 1970: Histories of Contemporary America Ser.

Goldwater Girls to Reagan Women: Gender, Georgia, and the Growth of the New Right

David Morris

Public Religions in the Future World is the first book to map the utopian terrain of the political-religious movements of the past four decades. Examining a politically diverse set of utopian fictions, this book cuts across the usual Right/Left political divisions to show a surprising convergence: each political-religious vision imagines a revived world of care and community over and against the economization and fragmentation of neoliberalism. Understanding these religions as utopian movements in reaction to neoliberalism, Public Religions invites us to rethink the bases of religious identification and practice. Offering new insights on texts from the Left Behind series to the novels of Octavia Butler, Public Religions shows that the utopian energy of the present opens new opportunities for political organizing and genuine, lasting community building. 

Public Religions in the Future World presents a literary history of the political-religious present, arguing that the power of public religion lies in the utopian visions that underlie religious beliefs. It shows that contemporary literary utopianism is deeply inflected with religious ideas, with the visions, values, and ambitions of Christianity, Islam, nature mysticism, and other traditions. Further, Public Religions demonstrates that this utopianism’s religiosity is in turn politically inflected, that it resonates with and underwrites a range of competing political projects: those of imperialism, globalization, neoliberal capitalism, deep ecology, and the pro-migration movement. 

David Morris constructs a working theory of how religion makes large-scale interventions in political debates. The novels in his study draw on religious traditions to articulate visions, programs, or missions for achieving some version of an improved world. In doing so, they undertake the work of literary postmodernism: to represent globality, to recover the voices of the underrepresented, and to imagine a future that escapes the destructiveness of global capitalism.

Public Religions in the Future World: Postsecularism and Utopia

Timothy J. Minchin

In 2018 almost half of all vehicles made in North America were produced at foreign-owned plants, and the sector was on track to monopolize the market. Despite this, the industry has been overlooked compared with its domestic counterpart, both in scholarship and popular memory. Redressing this neglect, America’s Other Automakers provides a new history of the foreignowned auto sector, the first to extensively draw on archival sources and to articulate the human agency of participants, including workers, managers, and industry recruiters.

Timothy J. Minchin challenges the view that the industry’s growth primarily reflected incentives, stressing human agency and the complexity of individual stories instead. Deeply human in its approach, the book also explores the industry’s impact on grassroots communities, showing that it had more costs than supporters acknowledged. Drawing on a wide range of primary and secondary sources, America’s Other Automakers uncovers significant tensions over unionization, reports of discriminatory hiring, and unease about the industry’s rapid growth, critically exploring seven large assembly facilities and their impact on the communities in which they were built.

America’s Other Automakers: A History of the Foreign-Owned Automotive Sector in the United States

This book brings together documents from multiple radical movements in the recent United States from 1973 through 2001. These years are typically viewed as an era of neoliberalism, dominated by conservative retrenchment, the intensified programs of privatization and incarceration, dramatic cuts to social welfare, and the undermining of labor, antiracist, and feminist advances. 

Yet activists from the period proved tenacious in the face of upheaval, resourceful in creating new tactics, and dedicated to learning from one another. Persistent and resolute, activists did more than just keep radical legacies alive. They remade radicalism—bridging differences of identity and ideology often assumed to cleave movements, grappling with the eradication of liberal promises, and turning to movement cultures as the source of a just future.

Remaking Radicalism is the first anthology of U.S. radicalisms that reveals the depth, diversity, and staying power of social movements after the close of the long 1960s. Editors Dan Berger and Emily Hobson track the history of popular struggles during a time that spans the presidencies of Richard Nixon and George W. Bush and bring to readers the political upheavals that shaped the end of the century and that continue to define the present.

Remaking Radicalism: A Grassroots Documentary Reader of the United States, 1973–2001

Ariella Rotramel

This book explores women of color’s grassroots leadership in organizations that are not singularly identified with feminism. Centered in New York City, Pushing Back brings an intersectional perspective to communities of color as it addresses injustices tied to domestic work, housing, and environmental policies and practices. Ariella Rotramel shows how activists respond to injustice and marginalization, documenting the ways people of color and the working class in the United States recognize identity as key to the roots of and solutions to injustices such as environmental racism and gentrification.

Rotramel further provides an in-depth analysis of the issues that organizations representing transnational communities of color identify as fundamental to their communities and how they frame them. Introducing the theoretical concept of “queer motherwork,” Rotramel explores the forms of advocacy these activists employ and shows how they negotiate internal diversity (gender, race, class, sexuality, etc.) and engage broader communities, particularly as women-led groups.

Pushing Back highlights case studies of two New York–based organizations, the pan-Asian/American CAAAV: Organizing Asian Communities (formerly the Committee Against Anti- Asian Violence) and South Bronx’s Mothers on the Move/ Madres en Movimiento (MOM). Both organizations are small, women-led community organizations that have participated in a number of progressive coalitions on issues such as housing rights, workers’ rights, and environmental justice at the local, national, and global levels.

Pushing Back: Women of Color–Led Grassroots Activism in New York City

Agatha Beins

This is the first analysis of periodicals’ key role in U.S. feminism’s formation as a collective identity and set of political practices in the 1970s. Between 1968 and 1973, more than five hundred different feminist newsletters and newspapers were published in the United States. Agatha Beins shows that the repetition of certain ideas in these periodicals—ideas about gender, race, solidarity, and politics—solidified their centrality to feminism.

Beins focuses on five periodicals of that era, comprising almost three hundred different issues: Distaff (New Orleans, Louisiana); Valley Women’s Center Newsletter (Northampton, Massachusetts); Female Liberation Newsletter (Cambridge, Massachusetts); Ain’t I a Woman? (Iowa City, Iowa); and L.A. Women’s Liberation Newsletter, later published as Sister (Los Angeles, California). Together they represent a wide geographic range, including some understudied sites of feminism. Beins examines the discourse of sisterhood, images of women of color, feminist publishing practices, and the production of feminist spaces to demonstrate how repetition shaped dominant themes of feminism’s collective identity. Beins also illustrates how local context affected the manifestation of ideas or political values, revealing the complexity and diversity within feminism.

With much to say about the study of social movements in general, Liberation in Print shows feminism to be a dynamic and constantly emerging identity that has grown, in part, out of a tension between ideological coherence and diversity. Beins’s investigation of repetition offers an innovative approach to analyzing collective identity formation, and her book points to the significance of print culture in activist organizing.

Liberation in Print: Feminist Periodicals and Social Movement Identity

This wide-ranging interdisciplinary collection—the first of its kind—invites us to recon­sider the politics and scope of the Roots phenomenon of the 1970s. Alex Haley’s 1976 book was a publishing sensation, selling over a million copies in its first year and winning a National Book Award and a special Pulitzer Prize. The 1977 television adaptation was more than a blockbuster miniseries—it was a galvanizing national event, drawing a record-shattering viewership, earning thirty-eight Emmy nominations, and changing overnight the discourse on race, civil rights, and slavery.

These essays—from emerging and established scholars in history, sociology, film, and media studies—interrogate Roots, assessing the ways that the book and its dramatization recast representations of slavery, labor, and the black family; reflected on the promise of freedom and civil rights; and engaged discourses of race, gender, violence, and power in the United States and abroad. Taken together, the essays ask us to reconsider the limitations and possibilities of this work, which, although dogged by controversy, must be understood as one of the most extraordinary media events of the late twentieth century, a cultural touchstone of enduring significance.

Contributors: Norvella P. Carter, Warren Chalklen, Elise Chatelain, Robert K. Chester, Clare Corbould, C. Richard King, David J. Leonard, Delia Mellis, Francesca Morgan, Tyler D. Parry, Martin Stollery, Dominic Meng-Hsuan Yang, Bhekuyise Zungu

Reconsidering Roots: Race, Politics, and Memory

Jane F. Gerhard

Judy Chicago's monumental art installation The Dinner Party was an immediate sensation when it debuted in 1979, and today it is considered the most popular work of art to emerge from the second-wave feminist movement. Jane F. Gerhard examines the piece's popularity to understand how ideas about feminism migrated from activist and intellectual circles into the American mainstream in the last three decades of the twentieth century.

More than most social movements, feminism was transmitted and understood through culture—art installations, Ms. Magazine, All in the Family, and thousands of other cultural artifacts. But the phenomenon of cultural feminism came under extraordinary criticism in the late 1970s and 1980s Gerhard analyzes these divisions over whether cultural feminism was sufficiently activist in light of the shifting line separating liberalism from radicalism in post-1970s America. She concludes with a chapter on the 1990s, when The Dinner Party emerged as a target in political struggles over public funding for the arts, even as academic feminists denounced the piece for its alleged essentialism.

The path that The Dinner Party traveled—from inception (1973) to completion (1979) to tour (1979-1989) to the permanent collection of the Brooklyn Museum (2007)—sheds light on the history of American feminism since 1970 and on the ways popular feminism in particular can illuminate important trends and transformations in the broader culture.

The Dinner Party: Judy Chicago and the Power of Popular Feminism, 1970-2007

Recent history—the very phrase seems like an oxymoron. Yet historians have been writing accounts of the recent past since printed history acquired a modern audience, and in the last several years interest in recent topics has grown exponentially. With subjects as diverse as Walmart and disco, and personalities as disparate as Chavez and Schlafly, books about the history of our own time have become arguably the most exciting and talked-about part of the discipline.

Despite this rich tradition and growing popularity, historians have engaged in little discussion about the specific methodological, political, and ethical issues related to writing about the recent past. The twelve essays in this collection explore the challenges of writing histories of recent events where visibility is inherently imperfect, hindsight and perspective are lacking, and historiography is underdeveloped.

Those who write about events that have taken place since 1970 encounter exciting challenges that are both familiar and foreign to scholars of a more distant past, including suspicions that their research is not historical enough, negotiation with living witnesses who have a very strong stake in their own representation, and the task of working with new electronic sources. Contributors to this collection consider a wide range of these challenges. 

They question how sources like television and video games can be better utilized in historical research, explore the role and regulation of doing oral histories, consider the ethics of writing about living subjects, discuss how historians can best navigate questions of privacy and copyright law, and imagine the possibilities that new technologies offer for creating transnational and translingual research opportunities. Doing Recent History offers guidance and insight to any researcher considering tackling the not-so-distant past.