San Antonio College Library

By the spring of 1969, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) had reached its zenith as the largest, most radical movement of white youth in American history - a genuine New Left. Yet less than a year later, SDS splintered into warring factions and ceased to exist. SDS's development and its dissolution grew directly out of the organization's relations with the black freedom movement, the movement against the Vietnam War, and the newly emerging struggle...

"If I Had a Hammer unearths the roots of the counter-culture and political radicalism of the 60s, and shatters the myth of the 50s as a decade of deadening conformity. For the 'Old Left,' the 50s were indeed a decade of defeat and disillusionment, as Maurice Isserman demonstrates through incisive and poignant portraits of aging radicals, including Irving Howe, Norman Thomas, and A. J. Muste. But defeat also compelled a reexamination of cherished beliefs,...

In his 1980 book When Dreams and Heroes Died, Arthur Levine presented a portrait of a generation of college students without heroes - a generation optimistic about their own futures, but pessimistic about the future of the country and the world. These students turned inward, away from activism and community and toward individual and material gain, a trend that continued throughout the 80s and showed little sign of changing. But when Levine returned...

This book demonstrates how colleges and universities have played a vital role during times of great crisis in American history, responding actively and helpfully to all the major challenges confronting their country. The colleges of the land became politicized repeatedly by such momentous developments as the American Revolution, the Civil War between the North and the South, the two vast global conflicts of the twentieth century, and America's controversial...

While the 1970s and much of the 1980s were relatively quiet decades in comparison to the 1960s, the divestment movement of the mid-1980s served as a catalyst for multicultural reform of the American college campus. Thus, in the 1990s, students once again began to turn to campus demonstration as a means to advance social change. Rhoads identifies the key to understanding this within the struggle over multiculturalism.