| Summary/Abstract |
Historians of the modern United States have long debated the scope and significance of radical left activism in the aftermath of the uprisings of the 1960s. One common argument has been that the U.S. left experienced decline and even collapse in the 1970s and 1980s in the face of an ascendant conservative movement. A major casualty of the left’s political program, as this interpretation has often gone, was its revolutionary internationalism—the dream of building solidarity among radical and revolutionary movements across the world.1 This narrative, while certainly not without merit, has tended to overlook the degree of diversity, improvisation, and reinvention that took place on the U.S. left in these decades. Indeed, as scholars have shown, it was in this moment of challenge that radicals set to work refining their analyses and tactics. Taking stock of the successes and failures of the 1960s, they developed new forms of movement structure and direct action that would give shape to much of what came after, from the anti-globalization protests of the 1990s to the Occupy and Black Lives Matter Movements in the twenty-first century.2
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