Summer Issue Preview: American Movements

As July approaches, we’re excited to offer you a glimpse of our forthcoming Summer issue, which ships on July 1 and launches online July 6. The issue includes a special section on “American Movements,” surveying the accomplishments and the limits of some of the most significant social movements on the American left today.

Black Lives Matter is the most dynamic of these peaceful insurgencies, and we asked three historians to share their perspectives on the movement. Frederick C. Harris places today’s activism in the context of an unfinished struggle for civil rights; Marcia Chatelain discusses women and Black Lives Matter with Dissent associate editor Kaavya Asoka; and Robert Greene examines the fight for black lives in South Carolina—a piece that feels all the more important following the murder of nine black congregants at Charleston’s Emanuel AME Church.

Also in the section: Nelson Lichtenstein analyzes labor’s shift to the left; Colin Kinniburgh connects the dots between anti-fracking activism from New York to Algeria to Poland, arguing that the battle is not local but global; Michael Kazin wonders why there is no antiwar movement; and Mary Cathryn Ricker explains the importance of community involvement in teacher unionism.

In our fiction section, we’re very proud to be publishing an excerpt from Joshua Cohen’s new novel Book of Numbers. Cohen first contributed to Dissent in 2005, and was just deemed “a major American writer” by Dwight Garner in the New York Times—we’re thrilled to have his writing in our pages again.

Also in the issue:

+ Keith Gessen on TV in Putin’s Russia

+ Thea Riofrancos on mining, state repression, and the future of the left in Ecuador

+ Marc Bassets on Podemos

+ Kirsten O’Regan on Tehran’s street artists

+ and much more!

If you don’t have one already, we hope you’ll consider signing up for a subscription today.