"This is the epic story of the struggle to build a mass socialist movement in ragtime America. Kipnis was a brilliant historian, and this is his enduring gift to activists." --Mike Davis A new edition of the out-of-print classic.

The German Social Democratic Party was the world’s first million-strong political party. This book examines key themes around which the party organized its mainly working-class membership, with a focus on the experiences and outlook of rank-and-file party members.

Volume 36B of Research in the History of Economic Thought and Methodology features a symposium reflecting on the significance of Mary Morgan's contributions to the history and philosophy of economics.

The Texas Left. Some would say the phrase is an oxymoron. For most of the twentieth century, the popular perception of Texas politics has been that of dominant conservatism, punctuated by images of cowboys, oil barons, and party bosses intent on preserving a decidedly capitalist status quo. In fact, poor farmers and laborers who were disenfranchised, segregated, and, depending on their ethnicity and gender, confronted with varying levels of hostility and discrimination, have long composed the "other" political heritage of Texas. In The Texas Left, fourteen scholars examine this heritage. Though largely ignored by historians of previous decades who focused instead on telling the stories of the Alamo, the Civil War, the cattle drives, and the oilfield wildcatters, this parallel narrative of those who sought to resist repression reveals themes important to the unfolding history of Texas and the Southwest. Volume editors David O'Donald Cullen and Kyle G. Wilkison have assembled a collection of pioneering studies that provide the broad outlines for future research on liberal and radical social and political causes in the state and region. Among the topics explored in this book are early efforts of women, blacks, Tejanos, labor organizers, and political activists to claim rights of citizenship, livelihood, and recognition, from the Reconstruction era until recent times.

First published in 1952 then out of print in recent years, this classic account of the American Left is once again available. In his introduction to the Cornell paperback edition, Michael Kazin reevaluates the book, viewing it in the context of subsequent work on the subject and of the recent history of the Left itself.

In the 2011 general election, the New Democratic Party stunned political pundits by becoming the Official Opposition in the House of Commons. After near collapse in the 1993 election, how did the NDP manage to win triple the seats of its Liberal rivals and take more than three-quarters of the ridings in Quebec? Reviving Social Democracy examines the federal NDP’s transformation from “nearly dead party” to new power player within a volatile party system. Its early chapters – on the party’s emergence in the 1960s, its presence in Quebec, and the Jack Layton factor – pave the way for insightful analyses of issues such as party modernization, changing ideology, voter profile, and policy formation that played a significant role in driving the “Orange Crush” phenomenon. Later chapters explore such future-facing questions as the prospects of party mergers and the challenges of maintaining support in the long term.

How is power being mediated in new democracies? Can media function independently in the unstable and polarised political environment experienced after the fall of autocracy? Do major shifts in economic and ownership structures help or hinder the quality of the media? How much can new media laws alter old journalistic habits and political cultures? And how do new technologies impact the media and democracy? This book examines these questions, drawing on a vast set of data assembled by a large international project.

"A definitive account of the Ruskin colonies and of their place in the larger social radical strivings of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. . . . Well written and solidly researched, it gives us an understanding of an important quest for heaven on earth." -- Edward K. Spann, author of Brotherly Tomorrows: Movements for a Cooperative Society in America, 1820-1920 This first book-length study of the Ruskin colonies shows how several hundred utopian socialists gathered as a cooperative community in Tennessee and Georgia in the late nineteenth century. The communitarians' noble but fatally flawed act of social endeavor revealed the courage and desperation they felt as they searched for alternatives to the chaotic and competitive individualism of the age of robber barons and for a viable model for a just and humane society at a time of profound uncertainty about public life in the United States.

In this history of radical publishing at the turn of the century, Elliott Shore focuses on the Appeal to Reason, the flagship newspaper of J.A. Wayland's publishing empire. As modern periodical publishing came of age with the appearance of the first mass-circulation newspapers and magazines, so too did both populism and socialism in the US. They drew strength from the same factors - the advance of technology, spreading industrialisation, the growth and concentration of urban populations and rising literacy rates.