The Birth of the Cuban Polyclinic

During the 1960s, Cuban medicine experienced changes as tumultuous as the civil rights and antiwar protests in the United States. While activists, workers, and students in western Europe and the United States confronted existing institutions of capitalism and imperialism, Cuba faced the even greater challenge of building a new society. Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.

The Woes of Aging

The book concludes with an epilogue that links the partial demise of Boy Scouting in the United States to the countercultural youth movements and antiwar protests of the global sixties. Ending on the theme of organized youth in crisis, however, is not meant to suggest a simplistic narrative arc delineating the rise and fall of the BSA. Rather, it speculates on how the dramatic membership loss of the 1970s had the paradoxical effect of invigorating both the forces of reform and reentrenchment in the movement, while the alleged assault on traditional American values in the culture wars and the “War on Terror” provided new outlets for young imperial masculinities.

Strengthening Channels of Communication, 1968–1970

At a time when U.S. women were pushed to the sidelines of antiwar protests because of a focus on draft resistance, American women’s peace groups carved out a place for themselves as middle-aged mothers of draft-age sons. This language paralleled that of Vietnamese women, who also described themselves as mothers of soldiers, allowing Vietnamese and American women to create an authentic bond between them as they also benefited from this language politically. While American women peace activists used this coalition to discuss the establishment of regular communication between POWs and their families in the United States, Vietnamese women publicly admonished the U.S. government's disrespect for life and praised the efforts of American mothers to maintain American ideals.

The Partisan Dynamics of Contention: Demobilization of the Antiwar Movement in the United States, 2007-2009

Changes in threats perceived by activists, partisan identification, and coalition brokerage are three mechanisms that help to explain the demobilization of the antiwar movement in the United States from 2007 to 2009. Drawing upon 5,398 surveys of demonstrators at antiwar protests, interviews with movement leaders, and ethnographic observation, this article argues that the antiwar movement demobilized as Democrats, who had been motivated to participate by anti-Republican sentiments, withdrew from antiwar protests when the Democratic Party achieved electoral success, if not policy success in ending the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The withdrawal of Democratic activists changed the character of the antiwar movement by undermining broad coalitions in the movement and encouraging the formation of smaller, more radical coalitions. While the election of Barack Obama had been heralded as a victory for the antiwar movement, Obama's election, in fact, thwarted the ability of the movement to achieve critical mass.