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A Nation Rising
Hawaiian Movements for Life, Land, and Sovereignty
Noelani Goodyear-Ka'opua, Ikaika Hussey, and Erin Kahunawaika'ala Wright, eds.
Duke University Press, 2014
A Nation Rising chronicles the political struggles and grassroots initiatives collectively known as the Hawaiian sovereignty movement. Scholars, community organizers, journalists, and filmmakers contribute essays that explore Native Hawaiian resistance and resurgence from the 1970s to the early 2010s. Photographs and vignettes about particular activists further bring Hawaiian social movements to life. The stories and analyses of efforts to protect land and natural resources, resist community dispossession, and advance claims for sovereignty and self-determination reveal the diverse objectives and strategies, as well as the inevitable tensions, of the broad-tent sovereignty movement. The collection explores the Hawaiian political ethic of ea, which both includes and exceeds dominant notions of state-based sovereignty. A Nation Rising raises issues that resonate far beyond the Hawaiian archipelago, issues such as Indigenous cultural revitalization, environmental justice, and demilitarization.

Contributors. Noa Emmett Aluli, Ibrahim G. Aoudé, Kekuni Blaisdell, Joan Conrow, Noelani Goodyear-Ka'opua, Edward W. Greevy, Ulla Hasager, Pauahi Ho'okano, Micky Huihui, Ikaika Hussey, Manu Ka‘iama, Le‘a Malia Kanehe, J. Kehaulani Kauanui, Anne Keala Kelly, Jacqueline Lasky, Davianna Pomaika'i McGregor, Nalani Minton, Kalamaoka'aina Niheu, Katrina-Ann R. Kapa'anaokalaokeola Nakoa Oliveira, Jonathan Kamakawiwo'ole Osorio, Leon No'eau Peralto, Kekailoa Perry, Puhipau, Noenoe K. Silva, D. Kapua‘ala Sproat, Ty P. Kawika Tengan, Mehana Blaich Vaughan, Kuhio Vogeler, Erin Kahunawaika’ala Wright
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The National Alliance of Black Feminists
A History
Ileana Nachescu
University of Illinois Press, 2025
Founded in 1975, the non-partisan National Alliance of Black Feminists (NABF) played a critical role in the Black women’s liberation movement and the fight for the Equal Rights Amendment. The Chicago-based organization’s Black humanist feminism powered a singular dedication to building coalitions while influencing its historic set of comprehensive political, economic, and cultural demands.

Ileana Nachescu places the NABF’s history as the bridge between Black women’s social activism in the 1970s and the intellectual activism of the 1980s. Her account details the NABF’s work and how it reflected the group’s strong humanist belief in the transformation of all human beings. Nachescu also shows that the NABF’s post-Eighties erasure from movement histories is consistent with how many white feminists marginalized women of color and rejected their leadership. From there, Nachescu examines Black lesbians’ vibrant support of the NABF and shows how respectability politics pressured the group to support its lesbian membership in private but maintain a public silence on the issue.

A rare in-depth look at an overlooked organization, The National Alliance of Black Feminists tells an untold story of Black women’s liberation in the Midwest.

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The New Civil Rights Movement Reader
Resistance, Resilience, and Justice
Edited by Traci Parker and Marcia Walker-McWilliams
University of Massachusetts Press, 2023

In the United States, the fight to secure full civil rights for African American people has endured for centuries. The movement has included many voices, among them, working people, charismatic activists, musicians and artists, the LGBTQIA community, veterans, suburbanites, and elected officials. Moving from the labor struggles of the 1930s to the sit-ins and boycotts of midcentury, and the Black Lives Matter protests of today, this expansive volume brings together first-person accounts, political documents and speeches, and historical photographs from each region of the country.

Designed for use in courses and engaging for general readers, this new compilation is the most diverse, most inclusive, and most comprehensive resource available for teaching and learning about the civil rights movement. With chronological and geographical depth, The New Civil Rights Movement Reader addresses a range of key topics, including youth activism, regional and local freedom struggles, voting rights, economic inequality, gender, sexuality, and culture, and the movement’s global reach.

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The New Decentralists
The Back-to-the-Land Movement and the Politics of Localism in Appalachia, 1968-2000
Jinny A Turman
West Virginia University Press, 2026

How some “back-to-the-landers” fled alienating urban, bureaucratic places for rural Appalachia in pursuit of self-reliance, liberation, and community, only to later find themselves vulnerable to a rising tide of national conservatism that minted new political elites on the state and local level at odds with their progressive social ideas and environmental values. 

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Next to Godliness
Confronting Dirt and Despair in Progressive Era New York City
Daniel Burnstein
University of Illinois Press, 2010
To many Progressive Era reformers, the extent of street cleanliness was an important gauge for determining whether a city was providing the conditions necessary for impoverished immigrants to attain a state of "decency"--a level of individual well-being and morality that would help ensure a healthy and orderly city. Daniel Eli Burnstein's study examines prominent street sanitation issues in Progressive Era New York City--ranging from garbage strikes to "juvenile cleaning leagues"--to explore how middle-class reformers amassed a cross-class and cross-ethnic base of support for social reform measures to a degree greater than in practically any other period of prosperity in U.S. history. The struggle for enhanced civic sanitation serves as a window for viewing Progressive Era social reformers' attitudes, particularly their emphasis on mutual obligations between the haves and have-nots, and their recognition of the role of negative social and physical conditions in influencing individual behaviors.
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No One Ever Asked
The Untold Story of a Civil Rights Worker
Arnold Rochvarg
University of Missouri Press, 2025
This engaging work by legal scholar Arnold Rochvarg presents a narrative history of the mid-1960s civil rights movement centered around the experiences of a white woman from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, who quit college to join the movement and became involved with many of the important events and persons of the day.
 
Rochvarg, the cousin of the woman around whom the narrative revolves, had for over fifty years been intrigued by the mystery surrounding the seven-year disappearance of his cousin Iris during the 1960s. Once he finally approached her about her rumored involvement in the civil rights movement, she generously shared her experiences with him and arranged for him to meet others with whom she had worked. His book corroborates and enhances the stories he was told through traditional research based on primary and secondary sources.  
 
More than a review of significant events of the mid-1960s, No One Ever Asked is also the story of the challenges and sacrifices of young civil rights workers both Black and white, young persons who not only faced violence and personal harm, but in many cases became estranged from their families because of their involvement in the movement. Rochvarg approaches history from the “bottom-up,” focusing on persons whose stories have never been told but have something to add to an understanding of the history of the movement. Many of them, even sixty years later, have never shared their stories because, as in the case of the central character of this book, no one ever asked them.
 
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Nonviolence
An Idea Whose Time Has Come
Ramin Jahanbegloo
Haus Publishing, 2023
A powerful book on the importance of committing to nonviolence.

In this compact book, Ramin Jahanbegloo argues that the time has come for humanity to renew its political, economic, and cultural commitment to the idea of nonviolence. At the core of the work of such towering fighters against oppression as Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., Nelson Mandela, the Dalai Lama, and Václav Havel, the idea of nonviolence still has much to teach us and much work to do in the ongoing fight for justice worldwide.
 
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Nuclear Nuevo México
Colonialism and the Effects of the Nuclear Industrial Complex on Nuevomexicanos
Myrriah Gómez
University of Arizona Press, 2022
In the 1940s military and scientific personnel chose the Pajarito Plateau to site Project Y of the secret Manhattan Project, where scientists developed the atomic bomb. Nuevomexicanas/os and Tewa people were forcibly dispossessed from their ranches and sacred land in north-central New Mexico with inequitable or no compensation.

Contrary to previous works that suppress Nuevomexicana/o presence throughout U.S. nuclear history, Nuclear Nuevo México focuses on recovering the voices and stories that have been lost or ignored in the telling of this history. By recuperating these narratives, Myrriah Gómez tells a new story of New Mexico, one in which the nuclear history is not separate from the collective colonial history of Nuevo México but instead demonstrates how earlier eras of settler colonialism laid the foundation for nuclear colonialism in New Mexico.

Gómez examines the experiences of Nuevomexicanas/os who have been impacted by the nuclear industrial complex, both the weapons industry and the commercial industry. Gómez argues that Los Alamos was created as a racist project that targeted poor and working-class Nuevomexicana/o farming families, along with their Pueblo neighbors, to create a nuclear empire. The resulting imperialism has left a legacy of disease and distress throughout New Mexico that continues today.
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