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"Clarence Darrow is best remembered for his individual cases, whether defending the thrill killers Leopold and Loeb or John Scopes's right to teach evolution in the classroom. In the first full-length biography of Darrow in decades, the historian Andrew E. Kersten narrates the complete life of America's most legendary lawyer and the struggle that defined it, the fight for the American traditions of individualism, freedom, and liberty in the face of the country's inexorable march toward modernity. Prior biographers have all sought to shoehorn Darrow, born in 1857, into a single political party or cause. But his politics do not define his career or enduring importance. Going well beyond the familiar story of the socially conscious lawyer and drawing upon new archival records, Kersten shows Darrow as early modernity's greatest iconoclast. What defined Darrow was his response to the rising interference by corporations and government in ordinary working Americans' lives: he zealously dedicated himself to smashing the structures and systems of social control everywhere he went. During a period of enormous transformations encompassing the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era, Darrow fought fiercely to preserve individual choice as an ever more corporate America sought to restrict it"--Provided by publisher

Atone time, Asa Philip Randolph (1889-1979) was a household name. As president ofthe all-black Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (BSCP), he was an embodimentof America's multifaceted radical tradition, a leading spokesman for BlackAmerica, and a potent symbol of trade unionism and civil rights agitation fornearly half a century. But with the dissolution of the BSCP in the 1970s, theassaults waged against organized labor in the 1980s, and the overall silencingof labor history in U.S. popular discourse, he has been largely forgotten amonglarge segments of the general public before whom he once loomed so large.Historians, however, have not only continued to focus on Randolph himself, buthis role (either direct, or via his legacy) in a wide range of social,political, cultural, and even religious milieu and movements. The authors of Reframing Randolph have taken Randolph's dusty portrait down fromthe wall to reexamine and reframe it, allowing scholars to regard him in new,and often competing, lights. This collection of essays gathers, for the veryfirst time, many genres of perspectives on Randolph. Featuring both establishedand emergent intellectual voices, this project seeks to avoid both hagiographyand blanket condemnation alike. The contributors represent the diverse waysthat historians have approached the importance of his long and complex careerin the main political, social, and cultural currents of twentieth-centuryAfrican American specifically, and twentieth-century U.S. history overall. Thecentral goal of Reframing Randolph isto achieve a combination of synthetic and critical reappraisal

Machine generated contents note: Part I: The State and Social Groups -- 1. Much More than an Outpost: The Military Post in the -- Trans-Mississippi West -- Frank N. Schubert -- 2. For Adults Only: The Anti-Child Marriage Campaign and Its -- Legacy -- Kriste Lindenmeyer -- 3. The Negro Service Committee and African-American Soldiers -- Nina Mjagkij -- 4. Fighting for Indian Artisans: John Collier, Ren6 d'Harnoncourt, -- and the Indian Arts and Crafts Board -- Susan Labry Meyn -- 5. Joseph A. Padway and the Open Shop Movement During World -- War II -- Andrew E. Kersten -- 6. Politics, Patriotism, and the State: The Fight Over the Soldier Vote, -- 1942-1944 -- Michael Anderson -- Part II: The State and Political Imagination -- 7. Eyes on a Different Prize: Federal Oversight of Civil Rights -- Memory, 1939-1967 -- Richard A. Reiman -- 8. April 12, 1945: The Other Day That Lives in Infamy -- Robert E. Miller -- 9. The American Centrifuge: Ethnicity in the United States at the -- End of the Century -- Rudolph J. Vecoli -- Index -- About the Contributors