“Voices of Dissent”: Social Movements and Political Protest in Post-war America: Registration Open
Rothermere American Institute, University of Oxford
2 June, 2017
Confirmed Keynote Speakers:
Professor Michael S. Foley (Université Grenoble Alpes), author of Front Porch Politics: The Forgotten Heyday of American Activism in the 1970s and 1980s
Dr Simon Hall (University of Leeds), author of American Patriotism, American Protest: Social Movements Since the Sixties
To register, please e-mail your name, institutional affiliation, and any dietary or other special requirements to the conference organiser at daniel.rowe@history.ox.ac.uk. There is a nominal registration fee of £15 per delegate, which includes lunch, refreshments throughout the event and a conference dinner on Friday evening. This fee is payable via PayPal (to the account ‘daniel.rowe@history.ox.ac.uk‘) or by cheque. Please send cheques, payable to the ‘Rothermere American Institute’, to the following address:
Daniel Rowe
c/o Rothermere American Institute
1a South Parks Road
Oxford
OXON
OX1 3UB
The deadline to register for this conference is Friday 19 May.
About the Conference
On the evening of April 4, 1967, Martin Luther King, Jr., delivered a historic speech before a crowd of 3,000 people at Manhattan’s Riverside Church. In his speech, entitled ‘Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence,’ King condemned the Vietnam War and American Cold War policy and characterized the U.S. government as the “greatest purveyor of violence in the world”. Describing Vietnam a “victim [of] deadly Western arrogance”, King detailed the war’s devastating effects on both America’s and Vietnam’s poor, and declared that it was a moral imperative for opponents of the war to use “every creative method of protest possible” to halt the war through non-violent means.
Over the last fifty years, political scientists, historians, novelists and journalists have written a great deal about the role that social movements and grass-roots organisations played in shaping the history of the 1960s. However, until recently, little attention has been paid grassroots activism in the years after Martin Luther King gave his controversial ‘Beyond Vietnam’ speech in 1967. In 2017, the fiftieth anniversary of Martin Luther King’s denouncement of the Vietnam War at Manhattan’s Riverside Church, the Rothermere American Institute is holding a one-day inter-disciplinary conference exploring social movements and political protest in post-war America. Connecting scholars working in different disciplines and on different time-periods, this conference seeks to explore the influence and impact of social movements on U.S. and transnational history.
A provisional programme can be accessed here. |
