2011 March |

Thaddeus Russell

Historian/Author A Renegade History of the United States

Host: Basima Farhat

Previously Aired On: Tuesday, March 29, 2011 – Listen to the Show!

Thaddeus Russell is a historian and cultural critic and the author of A Renegade History of the United States, to be published in 2010 by Free Press/Simon & Schuster. He teaches American history and cultural studies at Occidental College and has taught history, American Studies, and the history of philosophy at Columbia University, Barnard College, the New School for Social Research, and Eugene Lang College.

Born and raised in Berkeley, California, Russell graduated from Antioch College and received a PhD in history from Columbia University.

Russell’s first book, Out of the Jungle: Jimmy Hoffa and the Re-Making of the American Working Class, was published by Alfred A. Knopf in 2001. He has written for The Daily Beast, New York Magazine, the Los Angeles Times, Boston Globe, Christian Science Monitor, Salon, and Atlanta Journal-Constitution, as well as scholarly essays in American Quarterly and The Columbia History of Post-World War II America.

Russell has also appeared on the History Channel and The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.

ABOUT A Renegade History of the United States:

In this groundbreaking book, noted historian Thaddeus Russell tells a new and surprising story about the origins of American freedom. Rather than crediting the standard textbook icons, Russell demonstrates that it was those on the fringes of society whose subversive lifestyles helped legitimize the taboo and made America the land of the free.

In vivid portraits of renegades and their “respectable” adversaries, Russell shows that the nation’s history has been driven by clashes between those interested in preserving social order and those more interested in pursuing their own desires—insiders versus outsiders, good citizens versus bad. The more these accidental revolutionaries existed, resisted, and persevered, the more receptive society became to change.

Russell brilliantly and vibrantly argues that it was history’s iconoclasts who established many of our most cherished liberties. Russell finds these pioneers of personal freedom in the places that usually go unexamined—saloons and speakeasies, brothels and gambling halls, and even behind the Iron Curtain. He introduces a fascinating array of antiheroes: drunken workers who created the weekend; prostitutes who set the precedent for women’s liberation, including “Diamond Jessie” Hayman, a madam who owned her own land, used her own guns, provided her employees with clothes on the cutting-edge of fashion, and gave food and shelter to the thousands left homeless by the 1906 San Francisco earthquake; there are also the criminals who pioneered racial integration, unassimilated immigrants who gave us birth control, and brazen homosexuals who broke open America’s sexual culture.

Among Russell’s most controversial points is his argument that the enemies of the renegade freedoms we now hold dear are the very heroes of our history books— he not only takes on traditional idols like John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Carnegie, John Rockefeller, Thomas Edison, Franklin Roosevelt, and John F. Kennedy, but he also shows that some of the most famous and revered abolitionists, progressive activists, and leaders of the feminist, civil rights, and gay rights movements worked to suppress the vibrant energies of working-class women, immigrants, African Americans, and the drag queens who founded Gay Liberation.

This is not history that can be found in textbooks— it is a highly original and provocative portrayal of the American past as it has never been written before.

Please Visit:

www.thaddeusrussell.com

Kathleen Barry

PH.D. – Professor Emerita, Penn State University

Host: Basima Farhat

Previously Aired On: Tuesday, March 22, 2011 – Listen to the Show!

Kathleen Barry holds two doctorates – in sociology and in education – from the University of California, Berkeley. A university professor for twenty years, she was on the faculty of Brandeis University and is Professor Emerita of Penn State University. A Distinguished Visiting Professor at several universities, she was the recipient of a Fulbright Scholarship to Ireland and an invited scholar at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (School of Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences) in Paris. The author of five books and an internationally recognized feminist-human rights activist, she lectures widely in the U.S. and abroad.

Sociologist Kathleen Barry first broke new ground with her landmark book FEMALE SEXUAL SLAVERY (1979) which has been translated into six languages. This book launched a new global movement against trafficking in human beings. She reframed prostitution as a violation of human rights which led to the formation of the United Nations Non-Governmental Organization, The Coalition Against Trafficking in Women which she co-founded. Her book and activism earned her the Wonder Woman Award and she is featured in the famous Canadian film on pornography, Not a Love Story.

Her book, PROSTITUTION OF SEXUALITY: Global Exploitation of Women (New York University Press), presents the new international law against sexual exploitation she developed in collaboration with UNESCO. The law that makes sexual exploitation a violation of human rights has been adopted as state law on prostitution in Sweden and Iceland among other countries. For this work, she was named by Marie-Claire as one of the hundred women who most changed the world for women and she received an International Achievement Award from Penn State University.

She brought her feminist activism together with her empathetic writing as a biographer and the author of SUSAN B. ANTHONY: A Biography of a Singular Feminist. She is featured in the movie for television “One Woman, One Vote” and in Ken Burns’s PBS special “Not for Ourselves Alone: The Story of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony.”

Kathleen Barry’s international work led her to Vietnam in 1991 where she began a collaboration with Vietnamese women in the Women’s Research Program. Her edited volume, VIETNAMESE WOMEN IN TRANSITION captures an extraordinary moment of change, for better and for worse, in the condition of women as Vietnam. This book issued in Vietnamese through the Institute of Social Science in Ho Chi Minh City is recognized in Vietnam as the first published social science collaboration between the Americans and Vietnamese since the US war there.

Kathleen Barry’s new book is UNMAKING WAR, REMAKING MEN: How Empathy Can Reshape our Politics, Our Soldiers and Ourselves. Introducing new concepts such as core masculinity and expendable lives, this book exposes how masculinity and the military prepare men for killing and introduces new approaches to world peace and a new masculinity that is already in the making.

She is completing a new book on single women and spontaneity, THE SPONTANEOUS SELF, Women, Identity and Spirit. Her study of three generations of women in the Troubles in Northern Ireland is the subject of her next book.

MORE ABOUT UNMAKING WAR, REMAKING MEN:

One day at a beach Kathleen Barry witnessed an accidental death. Seeing how empathy drew together the bystanders – strangers until that moment – in shared human consciousness, she asked: ‘Why do we value human lives in everyday moments but accept the killing in war as inevitable?’

In Unmaking War, Remaking Men, Kathleen Barry explores soldiers’ experiences through a politics of empathy. By revealing how men’s lives are made expendable for combat, she shows how military training drives them to kill without thinking and without remorse, only to suffer both trauma and loss of their own souls. She turns to her politics of empathy to shed new light on the experiences of those who are invaded and occupied and shows how resistance rises among them.

And what of the state leaders and the generals who make war? In 2001, a fateful year for the world, George W. Bush became President of the US; Ariel Sharon became Prime Minister of Israel; and Osama bin Laden became the de facto world terrorist leader. Analyzing their leadership and failure of empathy, Unmaking War, Remaking Men reveals a common psychopathology of those driven to ongoing war, first making enemies, then labeling them as terrorists or infidels.

Kathleen Barry asks: ‘What would it take to unmake war?’ She scrutinizes the demilitarized state of Costa Rica and compares its claims of peace with its high rate of violence against women. She then turns to the urgent problem of how might men remake themselves by unmaking masculinity. She offers models for a new masculinity drawing on the experiences of men who have resisted war and have in turn transformed their lives into a new kind of humanity; into a place where the value of being human counts.

Please visit:

http://www.KathleenBarry.net

Helena Norberg-Hodge

Author/Filmmaker/Founder International Society for Ecology and Culture

Host: Basima Farhat

Previously Aired On: Tuesday, March 15, 2011 – Listen to the Show!

Author/filmmaker Helena Norberg Hodge (born 1946) is the founder and director of the International Society for Ecology and Culture, a non-profit organisation concerned with the protection of both biological and cultural diversity, and education for action: moving beyond single issues to look at the more fundamental influences that shape our lives. ISEC runs programs on four continents aimed at strengthening ecological diversity and community, with a particular emphasis on local food and farming.

Helena is a co-founder of the International Forum on Globalization (www.ifg.org), an alliance of sixty leading activists, scholars, economists, researchers and writers formed to stimulate new thinking, joint activity and public education in response to economic globalisation. She is also involved with the Global Ecovillage Network and directs the Ladakh Project, renowned for its groundbreaking work in sustainable development on the Tibetan plateau. She is a recipient of the Right Livelihood Award or Alternative Nobel Prize.

Helena is a leading analyst of the impact of the global economy on cultures around the world. A linguist by training, she was educated in Sweden, Germany, England and the United States, and speaks seven languages. She has lectured and taught extensively around the world from the Smithsonian Institution to Harvard and Oxford universities. She is the author of numerous works, including the inspirational classic, Ancient Futures: Learning from Ladakh, which together with an award-winning film of the same title has been translated into more than 30 languages. Her latest book is Bringing the Food Economy Home: Local Alternatives to Global Agribusiness (Zed Books, UK, 2002) The film Learning from Ladakh explores the interconnections of how state-forced development can lead to unsustainable outcomes by destroying local forms of economy–and destroying local forms of happiness and self-sufficiency despite expanded material plenty. The next generation is entirely ‘lost’ and unconnected to anywhere, leading to huge alienation socially as well as ecologically. The connection here is that when the social fabric and happiness of a locality is removed, the ecological fabric decays as well. The subtle film explores this very succinctly in memorable images. The film was produced in 1991.

Helena’s newest film made with Steven Gorelick & John Page is The Economics of Happiness. The Economics of Happiness describes a world moving simultaneously in two opposing directions. On the one hand, government and big business continue to promote globalization and the consolidation of corporate power. At the same time, all around the world people are resisting those policies, demanding a re-regulation of trade and finance—and, far from the old institutions of power, they’re starting to forge a very different future. Communities are coming together to re-build more human scale, ecological economies based on a new paradigm – an economics of localization.

The film shows how globalization breeds cultural self-rejection, competition and divisiveness; how it structurally promotes the growth of slums and urban sprawl; how it is decimating democracy. We learn about the obscene waste that results from trade for the sake of trade: apples sent from the UK to South Africa to be washed and waxed, then shipped back to British supermarkets; tuna caught off the coast of America, flown to Japan to be processed, then flown back to the US. We hear about the suicides of Indian farmers; about the demise of land-based cultures in every corner of the world.

The second half of The Economics of Happiness provides not only inspiration, but practical solutions. Arguing that economic localization is a strategic solution multiplier that can solve our most serious problems, the film spells out the policy changes needed to enable local businesses to survive and prosper. We are introduced to community initiatives that are moving the localization agenda forward, including urban gardens in Detroit, Michigan and the Transition Town movement in Totnes, UK. We see the benefits of an expanding local food movement that is restoring biological diversity, communities and local economies worldwide. And we are introduced to Via Campesina, the largest social movement in the world, with more than 400 million members.

The Economics of Happiness features a chorus of voices from six continents including Samdhong Rinpoche, the Prime Minister of Tibet’s government in exile, Vandana Shiva, Bill McKibben, David Korten and Zac Goldsmith. They tell us that climate change and peak oil give us little choice: we need to localize, to bring the economy home. The good news is that as we move in this direction we will begin not only to heal the earth but also to restore our own sense of well-being. The Economics of Happiness restores our faith in humanity and challenges us to believe that it is possible to build a better world.

Please visit:

http://www.localfutures.org/

and

http://www.theeconomicsofhappiness.org/