All-American Rebels: The American Left from the Wobblies to Today

by Robert C. Cottrell, John David Smith (Editor)

From women's suffrage to Civil Rights for African Americans, to the environment, and the gay and lesbian liberation movement, the American Left has achieved notable successes in the 20th and 21st centuries. Sometimes celebrated and sometimes reviled, the Left has taken on many forms and reinvented itself many times over the past century.

In All-American Rebels, historian Robert C. Cottrell traces the rise and fall, ebb and flow of left-wing American movements. Following an overview of early 20th century movements, Cottrell focuses on the 1960s to today, offering readers a concise introduction and helping them to understand the political and ideological roots of the Left today. Cottrell includes chapters on the most recent versions of the American left, discussing community organizing, gay liberation, the women's movement, the Campaign for Economic Democracy, the nuclear freeze movement, opposition to U.S. intervention in Central America, the anti-WTO campaign, Code Pink, Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, Antifa, and more. The demand for and support of democracy and the quest for empowerment in various guises unifies these different lefts to one another and to the general unfolding of American history. Cottrell argues that democratic engagement has proven inconsistent and at times outright contradictory. The Left has been most successful when it fully embraces a democratic vision.

Genres: History

264 pages, Kindle Edition

Published August 8, 2020

About the author

Robert C. Cottrell is professor of history and American studies at Cal State Chico and has written over twenty books, including Sex, Drugs, and Rock 'n' Roll.

Reviews

[Hannah · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book was marked "history" and I mistook the blurb to mean that it was a pro-democracy, scholarly book. It is neither. It pretends to be both but the array of slurs leveled at every politician who does not show a friendly face to Marxist thought (xenophobe, homophobe, inept, lame, ineffective, inflammatory, etc) along with unsupported phrases like "everybody knows ___" instead of quoting from true scholarly works meant I could not read every nasty word in this book.

The work does not give an honest analysis of the ideologies and thought processes that drive the movements mentioned in the blurb, and it does not compare and contrast and show strengths and weaknesses by actual data. It gives no footnotes with actual quotes; if you are interested in looking up a certain claim, then you would have to read the entirety of a handful of books that are quoted as further reading for each chapter. And yet they had time and space to create a diligent topical index that takes up over 5% of the book; why not a regular system of footnotes? Surely, as a professor, the author is fully adept at their use.

The book's message in a nutshell: "Sure, we have radicals in our group. We like democracy, but its exercise in politics leads us to name calling and free-speech-shaming. We may have a few nuts in our bunch, but honestly we're better than the opposition because they are all nuts. Need facts? Oh, everyone knows it. Hey, my friend wrote a book. Go read his book."

Unscholarly, hateful, and misinformed.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for a free reading copy. A favorable review was not required.

[Sandy · Rating 2 out of 5]

While I was expecting this book to be favorable to left-leaning thought (and it was), I was hoping for a historical and critical overview of the base ideologies to show how we got to where we are with those ideologies today. What I got was a very dry and superficial listing of names and dates associated with various left-leaning groups from the 1800s to today. The entire thing reads like an encyclopedia entry with no discussion or exploration of the overarching themes. The author is less an "author" and more a chronicler. Strangely for an academic leaning book, there is no regular footnote system, but rather an annotated bibliography for each chapter. While I was able to glean a few interesting nuggets for further research, any actual engagement with the material will have to come from elsewhere.

[Val · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is a dense and fascinating examination of the last 150 years of left-leaning politics in America. In my personal education, I found progressive figures markedly absent from state-endorsed texts, both at the high school and collegiate levels. I appreciated reading about the history of different progressive movements.

Thank you to #NetGalley for providing me a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.