Nonviolence in America

About this book

Nonviolence in America is a comprehensive compilation of first-hand sources that document the history of nonviolence in the United States from colonial times to the present. Editors Staughton and Alice Lynd bring together materials from diverse sources that illuminate a movement in American history that is sometimes assumed to have begun and ended with the anti-nuclear and civil rights struggles of the '50s and '60s but which is, in fact, older than the Republic itself. This revised and expanded edition of Nonviolence in America opens with writings of William Penn and John Woolman, of abolitionists like William Lloyd Garrison and Henry David Thoreau, and of anarchists Emma Goldman and William Haywood. It continues with testimonies of suffragettes and conscientious objectors of both World Wars, trade unionists and anti-nuclear activists. It includes classics such as Henry David Thoreau's "Civil Disobedience," William James's "The Moral Equivalent of War," and Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "Letter from Birmingham City Jail." A section is devoted to what the Lynds call "New Catholicism" and includes selections by Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton, and Jim and Shelley Douglass. Bringing Non-violence in America right up to the present are writings on the Vietnam and Persian Gulf Wars, and the continuing struggles against nuclear power plants and weaponry and for preservation of the Earth and its peoples.