American Protest Literature

by Zoe Trodd (Editor), John Stauffer (Foreword by), Howard Zinn (Afterword)

Overview

“I like a little rebellion now and then”—so wrote Thomas Jefferson to Abigail Adams, enlisting in a tradition that throughout American history has led writers to rage and reason, prophesy and provoke. This is the first anthology to collect and examine an American literature that holds the nation to its highest ideals, castigating it when it falls short and pointing the way to a better collective future.American Protest Literature presents sources from eleven protest movements—political, social, and cultural—from the Revolution to abolition to gay rights to antiwar protest. Each section reprints documents from the original phase of the movement as well as evidence of its legacy in later times. Informative headnotes place the selections in historical context and draw connections with other writings within the anthology and beyond. Sources include a wide variety of genres—pamphlets, letters, speeches, sermons, legal documents, poems, short stories, photographs, posters—and a range of voices from prophetic to outraged to sorrowful, from U.S. Presidents to the disenfranchised. Together they provide an enlightening and inspiring survey of this most American form of literature.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780674267831
Publisher:	Harvard University Press
Publication date:	04/03/2008
Series:	The John Harvard library
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	576
File size:	6 MB

About the Author

Zoe Trodd is Professor of American Literature at the University of Nottingham.

John Stauffer is Professor of English, of American Studies, and of African and African American Studies, Harvard University. He is the author of Giants: The Parallel Lives of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln.

Table of Contents

Cover

Title page

Copyright

Contents

Foreword by John Stauffer

Introduction

1. Declaring Independence: The American Revolution

Philip Freneau | “A Political Litany” (1775)

Thomas Paine | From Common Sense (1776)

John Witherspoon | From “The Dominion of Providence over the Passions of Men” (1776)

The Declaration of Independence (1776)

J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur | From Letters from an American Farmer (1782)

George Evans | “The Working Men’s Party Declaration of Independence” (1829)

“Seneca Falls Declaration of Sentiments” (1848)

Henry David Thoreau | From “Resistance to Civil Government” (1849)

John Brown | From “Provisional Constitution” (1858)

Daniel De Leon | From “Declaration of Interdependence by the Socialist Labor Party” (1895)

2. Unvanishing the Indian: Native American Rights

Tecumseh | Speech to Governor William Harrison at Vincennes (1810)

William Apess | “An Indian’s Looking-Glass for the White Man” (1833)

Lydia Sigourney | “Indian Names” (1834)

Charles Eastman | From From the Deep Woods to Civilization (1916)

Black Elk and John G. Neihardt | From Black Elk Speaks (1932)

Dee Brown | From Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee (1970)

Birgil Kills Straight and Richard LaCourse | “What Is the American Indian Movement?” (1973)

Roland Winkler | “American Indians and Vietnamese” (1973)

Mary Crow Dog | From Lakota Woman (1990)

Sherman Alexie | “The Exaggeration of Despair” (1996)

3. Little Books That Started a Big War: Abolition and Antislavery

David Walker | From Appeal to the Coloured Citizens (1829)

Harriet Beecher Stowe | From Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852)

Frederick Douglass | From “The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro” (1852)

John Brown | Prison Letters (1859)

Harriet Jacobs | From Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861)

The Emancipation Proclamation and the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution (1863, 1865–1870)

Ralph Chaplin | “Solidarity Forever” (1915)

James Baldwin | From “Everybody’s Protest Novel” (1949)

Stanley Kramer | From The Defiant Ones (1958)

Kevin Bales | From Disposable People: New Slavery in the Global Economy (1999)

4. This Land is Herland: Women’s Rights and Suffragism

Wendell Phillips | From “Shall Women Have the Right to Vote?” (1851)

Lydia Maria Child | From “Women and Suffrage” (1867)

National Woman Suffrage Association | From “Declaration and Protest of the Women of the United States” (1876)

Elizabeth Cady Stanton | From “Solitude of Self” (1892)

Charlotte Perkins Gilman | “The Yellow Wallpaper” (1892)

Mary Church Terrell | “Frederick Douglass” (1908)

Jane Addams | From “Why Women Should Vote” (1910)

Charlotte Perkins Gilman | From Herland (1915)

Nineteenth Amendment and Equal Rights Amendments (1920, 1923, 1943)

Crystal Eastman | “Now We Can Begin” (1920)

5. Capitalism’s Discontents: Socialism and Industry

Rebecca Harding Davis | From Life in the Iron Mills (1861)

Edward Bellamy | From Looking Backward, 2000–1887 (1888)

Jacob Riis | From How the Other Half Lives (1890)

Upton Sinclair | From The Jungle (1906)

Lewis Hine | “Sadie Pfeifer” and “Making Human Junk” (1908, 1915)

Ignatius Donnelly | From “The People’s Party Platform” (1892)

From Food and Drugs Act and Meat Inspection Act (1906)

Eugene V. Debs | Statement to the Court (1918)

William (Big Bill) Haywood | “Farewell, Capitalist America!” (1929)

Barbara Ehrenreich | From Nickel and Dimed (2001)

6. Strange Fruit: Against Lynching

Ida B.Wells | From Southern Horrors (1892)

W. E. B. Du Bois | “Jesus Christ in Texas” (1920)

Claude McKay | “The Lynching” (1920)

Richard Wright | From “Big Boy Leaves Home” (1936)

Abel Meeropol and Billie Holiday | “Strange Fruit” (1937, 1939)

League of Struggle for Negro Rights | “Bill for Negro Rights and the Suppression of Lynching” (1934)

Helen Gahagan Douglas | “Federal Law Is Imperative” (1947)

The John Brown Anti-Klan Committee | “Take a Stand against the Klan” (1980)

Michael Slate | From “AmeriKKKa 1998: The Lynching of James Byrd” (1998)

“The Lynching of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith, 1930” (2000)

7. Dust Tracks on the Road: The Great Depression

Dorothea Lange | “Migrant Mother” (1936)

Arthur Rothstein | “Farmer and Sons” (1936)

John Steinbeck | From The Grapes of Wrath (1939)

Walker Evans | Hale County, Alabama (1936)

James Agee | From Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941)

Woody Guthrie | “Tom Joad” (1940)

Richard Wright and Edwin Rosskam | From 12 Million Black Voices (1941)

Roy DeCarava and Langston Hughes | From The Sweet Flypaper of Life (1955)

Michael Harrington | From The Other America (1962)

Malik | “Poverty Is a Crime” (1972)

8. The Dungeon Shook: Civil Rights and Black Liberation

Robert Granat | “Montgomery: Reflections of a Loving Alien” (1956)

James Baldwin | “My Dungeon Shook” (1962)

Martin Luther King, Jr. | From “Letter from Birmingham Jail” (1963)

Marion Trikosko, “Civil Rights March on Washington, D.C.” (1963)

Malcolm X | From “The Ballot or the Bullet” (1964)

John F. Kennedy | “On Civil Rights” (1963)

Lyndon B. Johnson | From “The American Promise” (1965)

Amiri Baraka | “Black Art” (1966)

Tupac Shakur | “Panther Power” (1989)

New Black Panther Party | “Ten Point Program” (2001)

9. A Problem That Had No Name: Second-wave Feminism

Tillie Olsen | “I Stand Here Ironing” (1956)

Betty Friedan | From The Feminine Mystique (1963)

National Organization for Women | “Statement of Purpose” (1966)

Renee Ferguson | “Women’s Liberation Has a Different Meaning for Blacks” (1970)

Shirley Chisholm | “For the Equal Rights Amendment” (1970)

Gerda Lerner | Letter to Betty Friedan (1963)

Audre Lorde | “Poetry Is Not a Luxury” (1977)

June Jordan | “The Female and the Silence of a Man” (1989)

Katie Roiphe | From The Morning After (1993)

Ana Castillo | “Women Don’t Riot” (1998)

10. The Word is Out: Gay Liberation

Allen Ginsberg | From “Howl” (1956)

Stonewall Documents (1969–1970)

Carl Wittman | From “Refugees from Amerika: A Gay Manifesto” (1969)

Huey P. Newton | “The Women’s Liberation and Gay Liberation Movements” (1970)

Doric Wilson | From Street Theater (1982)

ACT UP | “Read My Lips” (1988); Bill T. Jones | Still/Here (1994)

Tony Kushner | From Angels in America (1990, 1991)

Lesbian Avengers | “Dyke Manifesto” (1993)

Leslie Feinberg | From Stone Butch Blues (1993)

Goodridge v. Department of Public Health (2003)

11. From Saigon to Baghdad: the Vietnam War and Beyond

Country Joe and the Fish | “I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-To-Die-Rag” (1965)

Denise Levertov | “Advent 1966” (1966)

Norman Mailer | From Why Are We in Vietnam? (1967)

Eddie Adams | “Saigon” (1968); Nick (Huynh Cong) Ut | “Napalm” (1972)

Michael Herr | From Dispatches (1967–1969, 1977)

John Balaban | “April 30, 1975” (1975)

Tim O’Brien | From “How to Tell a TrueWar Story” (1987)

Poets against the War

Lawrence Ferlinghetti | “Speak Out” (2003)

Jim Harrison | “Poem ofWar” (2003)

Robert Pinsky | “Poem of Disconnected Parts” (2005)

Clinton Fein | “WhoWould Jesus Torture?” (2004)

Ron Kovic | From Born on the Fourth of July (1976, 2005)

Afterword by Howard Zinn

Sources

Acknowledgments

Index

Editorial Reviews

In this time of warrantless wiretaps and imprisonment without trial, [this anthology] remind[s] us how hard previous generations of Americans fought to preserve and broaden our civil and human rights… By linking original works to later pieces Trodd underlines the historical roots of American dissent and the ongoing relevance of these writings.
-- Duncan Stewart Library Journal (starred review)

Trodd organizes this excellent anthology around 11 reform movements, most based on race, class, or gender (e.g., the American Revolution, abolition, women's suffrage, gay rights). Collecting the work of both established writers and new voices, the book comprises some hundred pieces (1–3 pages each): prose excerpts, political documents, poems, photographs, film briefs, essays, fiction, narratives, and orations… This excellent book can serve as a textbook as well as a resource on social change and the literature thereof. Indeed, the persuasiveness of the collection raises the question not only of whether protest literature is a genre of its own, but also of whether it is the most American literary form.
-- L. L. Johnson Choice

The recently published treasure American Protest Literature, edited by Zoe Trodd…belongs on our bookshelves for two types of enjoyment. For starters, it is an invaluable reference, the first anthology to collect and examine American literature 'that holds the nation to its highest ideals, castigating it when it falls short and pointing the way to a better collective future.' It is also a great pleasure to read the 500-plus pages… May the daily newspaper and the nightly news glow with new perspective. Read this book.
-- Karen DeCrow Syracuse New Times

From the Publisher