Raise Your Voice: 12 Protests That Helped Shape America - Softcover

Kluger, Jeffrey

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0525518320 ISBN 13: 9780525518327

Publisher: Philomel Books, 2024

Synopsis

Twelve stories of protests and marches--and the people, movements, and moments behind them--that helped shape our country's history, told by the bestselling author of Apollo 13! Perfect for today's young activists.

Rise up! Speak out! March!

Protests and demonstrations have spread throughout the United States in recent years. They have pushed for change on women's rights, racial equality, climate change, gun control, LGBTQI+ rights, and more. And while these marches may seem like a new phenomenon, they are really the continuation of a long line of Americans taking to their feet and raising their voices to cry out for justice.

From the Boston Tea Party to the suffragists, from the Montgomery Bus Boycott to Stonewall, peaceful (and not-so-peaceful) protest has been a means of speaking up and enacting change from the very founding of America. This collection recounts twelve of the major protests throughout the country's history, detailing the people behind them, the causes they marched for, and the impact they had.

From the award-winning and bestselling author of Apollo 13 comes a book perfect for today's new generation of activists.

Praise for Raise Your Voice:

"[Kluger] expertly brushes in historical contexts . . . Cogent reminders that armed rebellion isn't the only answer to social injustice." --Kirkus Reviews

"Show[s] how one person can inspire many . . . a strong resource for students." --Publishers Weekly

"Readers will become absorbed in each protest's narrative due to Kluger's ­adept writing." --School Library Journal

"Recommended for future activists." --School Library Connection

"Well-researched . . . An informative introduction to the history of American protests and their ongoing role in our society." --Booklist

About this title

About the Author

Jeffrey Kluger is the author of several books, including Disaster Strikes!, To the Moon!, Apollo 8, Apollo 13 (originally published as Lost Moon), and The Sibling Effect. As a science editor and senior writer for TIME for more than two decades, he has written over forty cover stories for the magazine. He lives in New York City. Follow Jeff on Twitter @jeffreykluger.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Introduction

You caught an awfully lucky break when you were born a person. We all did. There’s a lot for humanity to be proud of, after all. We’re the species that mastered art, that mastered science, that understands geometry and biology and astronomy and medicine. We build rockets and send spacecraft to other planets; we design buildings that tower half a mile into the sky; we dig tunnels underground where we accelerate subatomic particles nearly to the speed of light and use them to crack open the secrets of the universe.

We are, too, the species that knows how to love. Other animals surely bond deeply and powerfully to one another. They protect their babies; they guard their herds and flocks and packs. Elephants, dolphins and crows mourn their dead, bury their remains and caress their bones. Yet we are the species that feels and celebrates love in all its dimensions and all its depths. We would give our lives for the life of another—because to live without a loved one sometimes seems not to be alive at all.

And yet, we can be terrible too. We are the species that mechanized war, that commits murder out of rage or greed, that betrays friends or families if it means accumulating wealth. Worst of all, perhaps, we separate ourselves into camps: we divide ourselves by race, by gender, by religion, by nation, by sexual orientation, by politics and class. And it is the more powerful group that often exploits the less powerful.

Men claim rights they deny to women; white people claim privileges they have forbidden to black people and other people of color. Owners of companies cheat their workers; political groups with power exploit those without. Industrialized countries pollute the planet, indifferent to the needs of less industrialized ones. Heterosexual people drive gay people into the shadows. Nations with empires oppress their colonies. Countries with nuclear weapons terrorize the entire world.

We know better; indeed, we’re hardwired to know better. Scientists who study the mind have looked at which parts of the brain become active when we witness something that’s fundamentally unfair—a person cheating at a game, a landlord raising a rent so high that an elderly person is tossed into the street, a drug company charging so much for a medicine that sick people can’t afford it. The region of the brain that becomes active when we witness such things turns out to be the same region that goes to work when we feel disgust. It is, in some ways, an admirable part of us: we react to the thought of unfairness in the same way we do to the smell of a rotten egg or the sight of spoiled meat.

And yet if we’re disgusted by unfairness, we don’t always act that way. Down through the millennia, strong and dominant groups have again and again worked their will against weaker and subordinate ones. But down through those same ages too, the disadvantaged and the oppressed have risen up. Emperor Caligula was overthrown in ancient Rome. The Jewish slaves in ancient Egypt cast off the pharaoh’s yoke. The oppressed black people in South Africa took back their rights from the oppressing whites. The imprisoned nations of Eastern Europe wrenched themselves free of the old Soviet Union.

The United States itself was born in an act of rebellion, with the thirteen colonies rearing up against the king of England. Throughout our relatively brief history, that liberation tale has been told again and again, with black people and women and poor people and more recognizing injustice—recoiling from it as a thing turned foul—and demanding the freedoms that are their right. It’s an act not just of rising up, but of speaking out—and, when necessary, crying out.

Americans have raised their voices many such times over the centuries, and no one group’s liberation story is greater than any other’s. The ongoing battles for the right to live where you choose, to love whom you love, to have the job you want and the social freedoms you deserve, to vote for the people who will make the laws and vote against them if you don’t like those laws are all a part of our shared history.

And the best part of that—the part that activates the regions of the brain that light up at the thought of something sweet or just or good—is that when one group becomes freer, so do we all. The twelve stories of civil uprisings that follow are by no means the only ones that have shaped America, but they are among the ones that have shaped us most—and they are ones that teach us lessons still.

Edition details

• Publisher: Philomel Books
• Publication date: 2024
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0525518320
• ISBN 13: 9780525518327
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 224