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AbstractThe "pragmatic pacifist" tradition, exemplified by the transition of many peace activists in the 1930s to critical support for the Allied war effort during World War II, can provide a nuanced path for Western peace activists in responding to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. This essay examines how several voices of the American peace movement have addressed this situation, offering a variety of levels of critical support to Ukraine's fight for self‐defense and the US involvement in the conflict.

AbstractThe February 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine raises vital questions for peace activists and for those who study efforts to provide peaceful alternatives to international conflict. Five frequent contributors to Peace & Change present brief analyses of the current tragic circumstances in Ukraine, and international reactions to these circumstances, based on perspectives gleaned from peace activism and from studies of peace history.

Nineteen-seventy-two in Harrisburg? Why, that was Hurricane Agnes, of course, when the Susquehanna crested fifteen feet above flood stage and the region sustained billions of dollars in damage. But there was another inundation just before the June flood, as the national press, FBI agents, and Harrisburg Defense Committee workers descended on Pennsylvania's capital from January to April for the trial of a loose-knit group of opponents of the Vietnam War who became known as the Harrisburg 7. The prosecution of these (mainly) Catholic religious activists, accused by FBI director-for-life J. Edgar Hoover of plotting to kidnap Henry Kissinger and blow up heating tunnels under the nation's capital, was one of several high-profile trials of antiwar activists on conspiracy charges. The Chicago 8 (who allegedly planned to disrupt the 1968 Democratic convention), the Boston 5 (opponents of conscription, one of whom was pediatrician Benjamin Spock), and Daniel Ellsberg (who leaked the "Pentagon Papers") are better remembered today, but the Harrisburg trial deserves recognition as well. As this evocative account by William O'Rourke reveals, it underscores the intersection of the local and the national during this turbulent era.

Nineteen-seventy-two in Harrisburg? Why, that was Hurricane Agnes, of course, when the Susquehanna crested fifteen feet above flood stage and the region sustained billions of dollars in damage. But there was another inundation just before the June flood, as the national press, FBI agents, and Harrisburg Defense Committee workers descended on Pennsylvania's capital from January to April for the trial of a loose-knit group of opponents of the Vietnam War who became known as the Harrisburg 7. The prosecution of these (mainly) Catholic religious activists, accused by FBI director-for-life J. Edgar Hoover of plotting to kidnap Henry Kissinger and blow up heating tunnels under the nation's capital, was one of several high-profile trials of antiwar activists on conspiracy charges. The Chicago 8 (who allegedly planned to disrupt the 1968 Democratic convention), the Boston 5 (opponents of conscription, one of whom was pediatrician Benjamin Spock), and Daniel Ellsberg (who leaked the "Pentagon Papers") are better remembered today, but the Harrisburg trial deserves recognition as well. As this evocative account by William O'Rourke reveals, it underscores the intersection of the local and the national during this turbulent era.

This essay argues that the editors of The Christian Century, the most influential nondenominational liberal Protestant magazine in the mid‐twentieth century, spoke up forthrightly against almost all of President Harry Truman's Cold War policies. This opposition demonstrates that such views extended in these years beyond secular left and pacifist organizations, and therefore that the "Cold War consensus" was not as widespread as historians have suggested. While opposed to Communism, the magazine blamed increased global tensions after World War II on U.S. military policy and on U.S. complicity with European colonialism as much as on Soviet policy. Even when the Century did support U.S. policy, as during the Korean War, it continued to oppose other aspects of Cold War policy and it constituted a site of dialogue between mainline Protestantism and religious pacifists.