July 13, 2018

Jeff Biggers

Harvard Book Store and Mass Humanities welcome award-winning historian, journalist, and playwright JEFF BIGGERS for a discussion of his latest book, Resistance: Reclaiming an American Tradition.

Details

Across cities, towns, and campuses, Americans are grappling with overwhelming challenges and the daily fallout from the most authoritarian White House policies in recent memory.

In an inspiring narrative history, Jeff Biggers reframes today’s battles as a continuum of a vibrant American tradition. Resistance is a chronicle of the courageous resistance movements that have insured the benchmarks of our democracy―movements that served on the front lines of the American Revolution, the defense of the Constitution and Bill of Rights, the defeat of fascism during World War II, and landmark civil rights and environmental protection achievements.

Legendary historian Studs Terkel praised Biggers’s The United States of Appalachia as a "how-to book" in the tradition of the American Revolution. With Resistance, Biggers opens a new window into American history and its meaning today. In a recovery of unsung heroes, including Revolutionary forefather Thomas Paine, Resistance is a provocative reconsideration of the American Revolution, bringing alive early Native American, African American, and immigrant struggles, women’s rights, and environmental justice movements. With lucidity, meticulousness, and wit, Biggers unfolds one of our country’s best-kept secrets: in dealing with the most challenging issues of every generation, resistance to duplicitous civil authority has defined our quintessential American story.

About Author(s)

Jeff Biggers is the American Book Award–winning author of several works of history, memoir, journalism, and theater. His previous books include The United States of Appalachia, praised by the Citizen Times as a “masterpiece of popular history”; State Out of the Union, selected by Publishers Weekly as a Top Ten Social Science book in 2012; and Reckoning at Eagle Creek, winner of the Delta Prize for Literature and David Brower Award for Environmental Reporting.