Description
Book SynopsisOffers fifteen scholarly contributions - both original works and previously published - that together bring into focus the exceptional range of progressive activist initiatives that took shape in a single Midwestern city during the 1960s and 1970s.
Trade Review“While historical in nature, this book is very timely. At a time when cities are crumbling and facing similar social justice and economic issues, this book will help a new generation of activists and leaders to figure out the best strategies to effect change."—as Sullivan, Louisiana State University, co-author of
Dimensions of Blackness: Racial Identity and Political Beliefs“An important corrective to common assumptions about the undisturbed conservatism of St. Louis, according to which the Ferguson uprising ‘came out of nowhere,’ and also an excellent, more general roadmap of progressive politics in the United States in the mid-twentieth century. Izzo and Looker’s collection will richly repay the attentive reader; its conceptual reach far exceeds the progressive politics of this one midwestern city."—Matthew Frye Jacobson, Yale University, author of
Dancing Down the Barricades: Sammy Davis, Jr. and the Long Civil Rights Era“In addition to offering more than a dozen great stories of life in the Gateway City,
Left in the Midwest presents two lessons useful to historians and activists from any city, anywhere: first, a savvy untangling of the intertwined networks of people who worked to promote social, political, racial, and gender equality in postwar America; second, a model for putting left and liberal activism ‘in its place’—in this case, the streets and neighborhoods in which citizens worked, played, and worshipped as they struggled to build a better world."—Eric Sandweiss, Indiana University, author of
St. Louis: The Evolution of an American Urban Landscape
