social movements 
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SOURCE: TomDispatch
4/20/2023
A Deal with the Devil: Nonprofits, Social Movements, and Your Taxes
by Rebecca Gordon
As taxpayers tallied their contributions to nonprofit organizations last month, few probably reflected on the fact that the tax code, by shielding large wealthy foundations from taxes, has historically allowed funders to capture social movements, often stopping them from making demands for drastic change in society.
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SOURCE: Jacobin
8/28/2022
Recovering the Core Radicalism of the Civil Rights Movement: An Interview with Glenda Gilmore
by Robert Greene II
Cold war histories of civil rights have obscured the key role of communists and other radicals in establishing the economic demands of the movement and the practice of interracial mobilization.
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8/14/2022
How Poland's Solidarity Rejected the Temptation of Violence
by David Richards
The Polish Solidarity movement is an instructive study in how a coalition of workers, intellectuals and spiritual leaders maintained a commitment to nonviolence and dialogue in the face of repression.
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8/14/2022
Despite the Cultural Differences, There's Common Ground Between Boomers and Zoomers
by Joseph Preston Baratta
Despite the differences in their cultural touchstones, Gen Z faces the yet-incomplete challenge of the Baby Boom generation: uniting the world in novel ways to solve global problems.
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SOURCE: Dissent
4/27/2022
The Fatal Siloing of Abortion Advocacy
by Meaghan Winter
It was a strategic mistake for abortion rights advocates to emphasize the right to individual choice instead of the vast issues of economic justice, workforce quality, educational equity and personal safety that are impacted by whether women can control their own reproduction.
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4/24/2022
Footage in NYC's Archives Sheds Important Light on the Northern Civil Rights Movement and Police Efforts to Undermine It
by L.E.J. Rachell
Surveillance footage in the New York City Archives helps to highlight the importance of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) to the northern civil rights movement – and the techniques the NYPD used to disrupt it.
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SOURCE: The Atlantic
4/19/2022
These Books Tell of Change Happening Slowly, then Suddenly
Historians Lynn Hunt, Adam Hochschild, Kate Clifford-Larse and Keenaga-Yamahtta Taylor are among the authors whose books dig beneath the surface of famous leaders to describe how social movements built the strength to change laws, institutions and ideas.
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SOURCE: Boston Review
2/23/2022
The Beginnings of Queer Citizenship in West Germany
by Samuel Clowes Huneke
An emerging gay activist culture in West Berlin in the 1970s made substantial gains in building cultural spaces and expanding tolerance, but struggled to build political solidarity out of sexual identity amid other social divisions.
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SOURCE: The Atlantic
1/1/2022
The Truth About Prohibition
by Mark Lawrence Schrad
American historians have often identified Prohibition with a coalition of social reformers, nativists and religious fundamentalists. Looking at the international temperance and prohibition movement tells a different story of a fight against exploitation of workers and minority groups through addiction.
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SOURCE: The Metropole
12/8/2021
Rise And Fall Of A Movement — A Review Of “The Young Lords: A Radical History”
by Leo Valdes
Johanna Fernandez's history of the Puerto Rican activist organization reconstructs the movement's roots and shows that an organization formed in 1969 still offers a useful diagnosis of an "urban crisis" rooted in experiences in housing, schools, hospitals, and jails.
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SOURCE: KQED
10/11/2021
Historian Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor on the Structures of Racial Inequality and Social Movements Fighting It
“In the United States, it’s very stark that the past is not yet past. Problems that we think of as historical in fact continue to impact our lives on a daily basis.”
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SOURCE: New York Times
10/12/2021
When the Young Lords Took Over a Hospital and Changed Public Health Care
by Emma Francis-Snyder
"The dramatic takeover of Lincoln Hospital produced one of the first Patient’s Bill of Rights, changing patients’ relationship with hospitals and doctors nationwide."
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8/29/2021
Climate, Peace, and Health Require International Solidarity. Is it Possible to Build It?
by Lawrence Wittner
"Although there are no guarantees that social movements and enhanced global governance will transform our divided, problem-ridden world, they should provide us with at least a measure of hope that, someday, human solidarity will prevail."
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SOURCE: New York Magazine
6/25/2021
An Oral History of the Lesbian Avengers
The Lesbian Avengers organized and demonstrated in the 1990s to fight homophobia and sexism within the movement for queer liberation.
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SOURCE: Los Angeles Times
3/17/2021
The Future of L.A. is Here. Robin D.G. Kelley’s Radical Imagination Shows Us the Way
Historian Robin Kelley discusses the work of his mentor Cedric Robinson, whose discussions in "Black Marxism" offer a way to circumvent the reductionist tendencies of the class- and race-oriented wings of the left today.
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SOURCE: The Guardian
2/25/2021
Fight To Vote: The Woman Who Was Key In 'Getting Us The Voting Rights Act'
Historian Carol Anderson explains the contributions of Amelia Boynton to the Selma movement and the erasure of women's organizing work from many histories of the movement.
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SOURCE: Mother Jones
10/13/2020
A Scholar of American Doom Doesn’t See How Capitalism Can Fix This Crisis
"There are probably a billion and a half people, maybe more, maybe 2 billion, in the informal working class who have simply been triaged already in advance. So the fate of a very large minority of humanity has been determined now."
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SOURCE: The New Yorker
9/25/2020
The Case to End the Supreme Court as We Know It
by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor
The Supreme Court has historically supported democratic and egalitarian change only when forced by social movements. People must stop looking to the power invested in the court and start looking for the power latent in themselves.
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SOURCE: The New Republic
9/24/2020
The Forgotten Feminists of the Backlash Decade
Lisa Levenstein's book assesses a shift in the women's movement in the 1990s into digital spaces and professionalized issue organizations. A reviewer considers what that shift enabled women to achieve and what it cost.
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SOURCE: The Intercept
6/27/2020
Scholar Robin D.G. Kelley on how Today’s Abolitionist Movement can Fundamentally Change the Country
"Part of defunding the police is a recognition that the police, as constituted, make life more dangerous for vulnerable populations even as it creates a sense of false safety for white people."
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