Witness to the Revolution: Radicals, Resisters, Vets, Hippies,

Witness to the Revolution: Radicals, Resisters, Vets, Hippies, and the Year America Lost Its Mind and Found Its Soul

The electrifying story of the turbulent year when the sixties ended and America teetered on the edge of revolution

NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH

As the 1960s drew to a close, the United States was coming apart at the seams. From August 1969 to August 1970, the nation witnessed nine thousand protests and eighty-four acts of arson or bombings at schools across the country. It was the year of the My Lai massacre investigation, the Cambodia invasion, Woodstock, and the Moratorium to End the War. The American death toll in Vietnam was approaching fifty thousand, and the ascendant counterculture was challenging nearly every aspect of American society. Witness to the Revolution, Clara Binghamâ€™s unique oral history of that tumultuous time, unveils anew that moment when America careened to the brink of a civil war at home, as it fought a long, futile war abroad.

Woven together from one hundred original interviews, Witness to the Revolution provides a firsthand narrative of that period of upheaval in the words of those closest to the actionâ€”the activists, organizers, radicals, and resisters who manned the barricades of what Students for a Democratic Society leader Tom Hayden called â€œthe Great Refusal.â€

We meet Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn of the Weather Underground; Daniel Ellsberg, the former Defense Department employee who released the Pentagon Papers; feminist theorist Robin Morgan; actor and activist Jane Fonda; and many others whose powerful personal stories capture the essence of an era. We witness how the killing of four students at Kent State turned a straitlaced social worker into a hippie, how the civil rights movement gave birth to the womenâ€™s movement, and how opposition to the war in Vietnam turned college students into prisoners, veterans into peace marchers, and intellectuals into bombers.

With lessons that can be applied to our time, Witness to the Revolution is more than just a record of the death throes of the Age of Aquarius. Today, when America is once again enmeshed in racial turmoil, extended wars overseas, and distrust of the government, the insights contained in this book are more relevant than ever.

Praise for Witness to the Revolution

â€œEspecially for younger generations who didnâ€™t live through it,Â Witness to the RevolutionÂ is a valuable and entertaining primer on a moment in American history the likes of which we may never see again.â€â€”Bryan Burrough,Â The Wall Street Journal

â€œA gripping oral history of the centrifugal social forces tearing America apart at the end of the â€™60s . . . This is rousing reportage from the front lines of US history.â€â€”O: The Oprah Magazine

â€œThe familiar voices and the unfamiliar ones are woven together with documents to make this a surprisingly powerful and moving book.â€â€”New York Times Book Review

â€œ[An] Enthralling and brilliant chronology of the period between August 1969 and September 1970.â€â€”Buffalo News

â€œ[Bingham] captures the essence of these fourteen months through the words of movement organizers, vets, students, draft resisters, journalists, musicians, government agents, writers, and others. . . . This oral history will enable readers to see that era in a new light and with fresh sympathy for the motivations of those involved. While Binghamâ€™s is one of many retrospective looks at that period, it is one of the most immediate and personal.â€â€”Booklist
Country USA
Manufacturer Random House
Binding Hardcover
ReleaseDate 2016-05-31
EANs 9780812993189

Country	USA
Manufacturer	Random House
Binding	Hardcover
ReleaseDate	2016-05-31
EANs	9780812993189

Witness to the Revolution: Radicals, Resisters, Vets, Hippies, and the Year America Lost Its Mind and Found Its Soul

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