The richness of the American radical tradition presented in a single volume. Radicalism is as American as apple pie. One can scarcely imagine what American society would look like without the abolitionists, feminists, union organizers, civil rights workers, gay and lesbian activists, and environmentalists who have fought to breathe life into the promises of freedom and equality, the lifeblood of American democracy. The first anthology of its kind, The Radical Reader brings together more than two hundred primary documents in the most comprehensive collection ever assembled of the writings of America's native radical tradition. Spanning the colonial period through the 1990s, the documents have been drawn from a wealth of sources—speeches, manifestos, newspaper editorials, literature, pamphlets, and private letters—representing the work of Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Skidmore, Sojourner Truth, Terence Powderly, Eugene Debs, Marcus Garvey, C. Wright Mills, The Combahee River Collective, Aldo Leopold, Martha Shelley, Stokely Carmichael, and Audre Lorde, along with many others. From Thomas Paine's "Common Sense" to Kate Millett's "Sexual Politics," these documents sparked, guided, and distilled the most influential movements in American history. Brief introductory essays by the editors provide a rich biographical and historical context for each selection.

Author Biography: Timothy Patrick McCarthy teaches in the department of history and literature at Harvard University; he is a doctoral candidate at Columbia University, where he is completing a dissertation on abolitionism. He is editor of Freedom's Fiction: Antebellum Literature of Slave Rebellion. John C. McMillan is a doctoral candidate in American history at Columbia University, where he is completing a dissertation on radicalism in the 1960s. He is presently collaborating on Voices of the Black Experience: The Columbia Reader in African-American History, and is co-editing, with Paul Buhle, a collection of essays on the New Left.