Book Talk | Linda Gordon | Seven Social Movements That Changed America

“History doesn’t repeat itself but sometimes it rhymes:” KKK and American fascists of the 1920s-30s.  

A talk from Linda Gordon’s new book, Seven Social Movements That Changed America

Followed by a conversation with Steven Hahn

Monday, March 31st (5:30-7:00 PM)

Linda Gordon is the Florence Kelley Professor of History and University Professor of Humanities at NYU. Winner of two Bancroft Prizes for best book in American history, Linda Gordon is the author of books such as The Second Coming of the KKK and a biography of photographer Dorothea Lange. For the first part of her career, Gordon’s writing examined the historical roots of social policy in the US, particularly in relation to gender and family structures. Her first book, Woman’s Body, Woman’s Right: The History of Birth Control in America (Viking/Penguin, 1976), published in 1976 and reissued in 1990, remains the definitive history of birth-control politics in the US. It was completely revised and re-published as The Moral Property of Women in 2002. Heroes of Their Own Lives: The History and Politics of Family Violence (Viking/Penguin, 1988) won the Joan Kelly prize of the American Historical Association. Gordon served on the Departments of Justice/Health and Human Services Advisory Council on Violence Against Women for the Clinton administration (a council abolished by the Bush administration). Her history of welfare, Pitied But Not Entitled: Single Mothers and the History of Welfare (Free Press, 1994), won the Berkshire Prize and the Gustavus Myers Human Rights Award. Her 1999 book, The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction, the story of a vigilante action against Mexican-Americans, won the Bancroft prize and the Beveridge prize for best book on the history of the Western Hemisphere.

Steven Hahn is an acclaimed writer and professor of history at NYU whose works include Illiberal Aerica: A History,  A Nation Under Our Feet, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the Bancroft Prize, and A Nation Without Borders. He is a specialist on the international history of slavery, emancipation, and race, on the construction of American empire, and on the social and political history of the “long nineteenth century” in the United States.  He has written for The Nation, Dissent, The New Republic, Le Monde Diplomatique, and the New York Times, as well as for the American Historical Review and Past and Present. Hahn is also co-author and co-editor of The Countryside in the Age of Capitalist Transformation:  Essays in the Social History of Rural America, and Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation.  Land and Labor in 1865.