Jeff Biggers, "Resistance"

Jeff Biggers discusses his book, "Resistance" at Politics and Prose on 7/10/18.

As Biggers shows in this people’s history of social justice activism in America, the nation was founded on resistance. Using Thomas Paine’s rousing Common Sense as his model and point of departure, Biggers chronicles centuries of freedom movements from the Revolution to the defeat of fascism during World War II, from early Native American and immigrant struggles to the Abolitionists and women’s suffrage advocates and on to the civil rights movement, LGBTQ activism, Black Lives Matter, Me Too, and more. Putting the anti-Trump struggle on this longer continuum, Biggers, the award-winning author of The United States of Appalachia, reminds us how essential—and successful—resistance has been in overcoming threats to our freedom, a tradition he charges us to continue.

JEFF BIGGERS is an award-winning historian, journalist, and playwright. He is the author of several books, including The United States of Appalachia, State Out of the Union, and Reckoning at Eagle Creek, winner of the Delta Prize for Literature and David Brower Award for environmental reporting. His last book, The Trials of a Scold, was long-listed for the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography. He is the founder of the Climate Narrative Project, an arts and advocacy initiative for schools and communities.

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Produced by Tom Warren