Learn how renegades shaped the nation from the gutters up -- from Thaddeus Russell

[Billy Burnett]

Run time: 03:19 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iJ0xW7-gEy0   Posted on YouTube: October 14, 2010 By YouTube Member: SimonSchusterVideos Views on YouTube: 7   Posted on DU: October 17, 2010 By DU Member: Billy Burnett Views on DU: 242

 
This is a GREAT book! Simply a must for progressives. :thumbsup: :thumbsup:

A Renegade History of the United States by Thaddeus Russell
http://www.powells.com/biblio/2-9781416571063-3

{snip from publisher's comments}

Russell brilliantly and vibrantly argues that it was history's iconoclasts who established many of our most cherished liberties. Russell finds these pioneers of personal freedom in the places that usually go unexamined--saloons and speakeasies, brothels and gambling halls, and even behind the Iron Curtain. He introduces a fascinating array of antiheroes: drunken workers who created the weekend; prostitutes who set the precedent for women's liberation, including Diamond Jessie Hayman, a madam who owned her own land, used her own guns, provided her employees with clothes on the cutting-edge of fashion, and gave food and shelter to the thousands left homeless by the 1906 San Francisco earthquake; there are also the criminals who pioneered racial integration, unassimilated immigrants who gave us birth control, and brazen homosexuals who broke open America's sexual culture.

Among Russell's most controversial points is his argument that the enemies of the renegade freedoms we now hold dear are the very heroes of our history books-- he not only takes on traditional idols like John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Carnegie, John Rockefeller, Thomas Edison, Franklin Roosevelt, and John F. Kennedy, but he also shows that some of the most famous and revered abolitionists, progressive activists, and leaders of the feminist, civil rights, and gay rights movements worked to suppress the vibrant energies of working-class women, immigrants, African Americans, and the drag queens who founded Gay Liberation.

This is not history that can be found in textbooks-- it is a highly original and provocative portrayal of the American past as it has never been written before.