Resistance | Jeff Biggers

"Reading this book, I saw history vanquish amnesia, David slay Goliath, and tenacity take down tyrants. I saw a long, unbroken chain of resistance extending back through centuries. I saw the world saved over and over. I saw heroes and declared them my ancestors. I heard stories to inspire bold action. I found traditions I want to pass on.” —Sandra Steingraber, activist and author, Living Downstream and Raising Elijah

"Well-informed and often witty...Biggers succeeds in showing how the long tradition of resistance movements continues today."--Publishers Weekly

"A widely ranging history of intellectual and moral resistance within American politics."
—Kirkus Reviews

"Biggers provides a wealth of historical detail in this celebration of past American resistance and call for continued dissent."--Booklist

"This book is vitally important reading for all Americans." —Susan Straight, author of Highwire Moon and A Million Nightingales

“Journalist Jeff Biggers’s handy reader...An intellectually honest and valuable read.”--The Progressive Magazine

“These times are tumultuous and divisive. But Jeff Biggers, a gifted writer who approaches history as expansively as Howard Zinn and as passionately as Eduardo Galeano, finds resistance everywhere. He shows us how freedom movements—led by people of color, women, and commoners, from revolutionary-era rebels to today's loud majority—have pulled American democracy away from tyranny and toward humanity time and again. These powerful, urgent essays remind us that everywhere there is resistance there is hope.”
—Jeff Chang, author of We Gon’ Be Alright: Notes on Race and Resegregation

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 and compelling narrative history, Jeff Biggers reframes today’s battles as a continuum of a vibrant American tradition. Resistance is a masterful chronicle of the arduous, courageous, and often squabbling resistance movements that 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 various civil rights struggles.

Legendary historian Studs Terkel praised Biggers’s The United States of Appalachia, now in its eighth printing, 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 brilliant recovery of many 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 pioneering environmental justice movements. With lucidity, wit and meticulousness, 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.

Read an excerpt in Lapham's Quarterly: The Literary Instigator of the American Revolution

Read an excerpt in Salon: Trump is Taking Us Back to 1798.

Read an excerpt on Common Dreams: American Resistance Should Also Thank Corsica

Read an excerpt at Zinn Education Project: Marie Equi

Read an excerpt on The Guardian: West Virginia Teachers Strike is What Real Resistance Looks Like

Read an excerpt on History News Network: Maria Stewart, First Black Feminist.

Interview with Ken Chen, PEN America: We're All in the Resistance Now

Interview with Laura Flanders Show: Resistance, the Ballot and the Bullhorn

Interview with Marc Steiner, Real News Network: The History of American Resistance

Interview with Krystal Ball on Hill RV: America was Built on Resistance

Interview on River to River, Iowa Public Radio: New Book Explores History of American Resistance.

Interview on KJZZ NPR-Phoenix: Reclaiming American Resistance

"...an exemplary job of unpacking concepts and historical events and presenting them in an easily digestible way for the general reader."--LA Review of Books

"Must Read: His latest book may be his best yet. Resistance chronicles the hard-fought social justice movements and rebellions throughout American history. With fresh insights from the American Revolution to Standing Rock, Biggers argues that resistance is a quintessential American tradition and the most patriotic act we can undertake to sustain democracy."--Blue Ridge Outdoors

"Biggers proves in compelling prose that, if anything, history does repeat itself — not only in its hardships and misfortunes, but its times of human connection, understanding and positive change."--Citizen-Times

"...reveals the dynamic, complicated nature of our shared history and the people and movements that have overcome — or still struggle against — injustice and prejudice in America.’"--The Gazette

Advance Praise

"Resist we must, resist we will―and as this volume powerfully reminds us, in so doing we are acting on the deepest American instincts." ―Bill McKibben, author of Radio Free Vermont: A Fable of Resistance

"With compelling and engaging prose, Jeff Biggers lays out the case for Resistance in the age of Trump. Using Common Sense, Thomas Paine’s incendiary call to overthrow the British, as the thread that binds his narrative, Biggers interweaves stories from before the American Revolution to the present to offer the reader a view of history not found in most high school textbooks. From the armed resistance of the Powhatan in 1622 to the protests of the Water Protectors against the Dakota Access Pipeline; from the speeches and essays of Maria Stewart, 'the first Black feminist-abolitionist in America,' to the words of Black Lives Matter founder Alicia Garza, he entreats us to remember that the constitution of our country is founded on the premise of 'We the People.' There are so many lessons to learn from Resistance: Reclaiming an American Tradition. Our turbulent times, Biggers shows us, have eerie and chilling parallels to the birth pangs of our nation and to the continuing struggles of 'We the People' to define and claim our voices. At this moment in history, when even the act of listening to the news can cause despair, Biggers gives us hope. In response to our darkness, he reaffirms the light that resistance offers. He shows us that the free expression of resistance, whether with the pen, our marching feet, the taking of a knee before a football game, the words to a song―to name a few―remains a cornerstone of what it means to be American." ―Naomi Benaron, author of the Bellwether Prize–winning Running the Rift

"To make the case for resistance in the age of Trump, Biggers (The United States of Appalachia) traces U.S. opposition movements from pre-Revolutionary times to the present, drawing parallels between the tumultuous present and the early days of the Republic. Well-informed and often witty, Biggers covers the resistance movements—and their many, often unsung heroes—of Native Americans, African-Americans, immigrants, and those fighting for women’s rights and environmental justice. Readers meet, among others, Ona Maria Judge, a slave who escaped from George Washington’s household in 1796; labor activist and physician Marie Equi, who was physically assaulted for her outspoken dissent against America’s entry into WWI; Bree Newsome, who scaled a 30-foot flagpole to remove the Confederate flag from the South Carolina statehouse in 2015; and Lakota historian Ladonna Brave Bull Allard, a leader of the Native American resistance against the Dakota Access Pipeline in 2016. Biggers also discusses the restorative processes of “truth and reconciliation commissions” to address centuries of racial injustices and the way some rural areas and U.S. cities are combating climate change in defiance of “the coal-peddling Trump administration.” Some sections are cursory, but Biggers succeeds in showing how the long tradition of resistance movements continues today."--Publishers Weekly

"A widely ranging history of intellectual and moral resistance within American politics. Biggers (The Trials of a Scold: The Incredible True Story of Writer Anne Royall, 2017, etc.) connects this tradition to the authoritarian tendencies of the Trump presidency, arguing, "the language of Trump's America First narrative…reflected [Thomas] Paine's warning of ‘brutish' leadership." This brief survey is structured in five essayistic chapters, each focused on a different era and aspect of resistance. He considers figures both widely known, such as Paine, or his own mentor the Rev. William Sloane Coffin, and more obscure—e.g., the anti-World War I protester and activist Marie Equi. Biggers calls out beloved figures who fell on the wrong side of resistance movements, like George Washington, who obsessively pursued runaway house slaves. Slavery provides a fuller fulcrum for the author's discussion; he examines both Frederick Douglass and those who argued against nonviolent resistance to this historical wrong. In "Enemy of the People," Biggers contrasts Trump's brazen attacks on the press with the conflict between free speech and John Adams' Alien and Sedition Acts, which Thomas Jefferson noted "had been designed specifically to suppress oppositional media." In "To Undo Mistakes," the author looks at early American immigration policy debates, as well as the more recent internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II, tying them to the resistance sparked by Trump's pursuit of a religion-based travel ban. Unlike previous immigration bans, "a coordinated effort by religious congregations to resist Trump's deportation forces emerged across the country." In the final essay, "Cities of Resistance," Biggers links early interest in environmental preservation (embodied by Thoreau's writings, among others) with attempts to counter the Trump administration's dismantling of key federal oversight.

The author writes clearly and with a firm grasp of historical comparison, intimately focused on compelling figures; still, his work could use fuller focus on the actual resistance movements Trump has inspired. An engaging jeremiad proposing that "the resistance is now in the hands of a new generation.""-Kirkus Reviews

"Award-winning journalist and historian Biggers, best known for The United States of Appalachia (2006), here explores America’s first decades to show how civic resistance underpins U.S. history and remains an integral force in sustaining democracy. Biggers explains that while the current situations that are fomenting and exploiting political chaos may shock us, these are not new phenomena. He also encourages readers to balance censure with praise when analyzing historic figures. Yes, slavery stained Thomas Jefferson, even as the colonies’ anemic opposition to slavery let the British rightfully accuse them of hypocrisy. Despite lip-service respect for Native Americans, most revolutionaries actually viewed indigenous people as mere “savages.” Alexander Hamilton, of all famous immigrants, argued that President Jefferson’s call for unlimited immigration would attract dangerous outsiders. The point is that the messiness of resistance should not make us apolitical. Biggers does not probe contemporary political activism; instead, he provides a wealth of historical detail in this celebration of past American resistance and call for continued dissent."--Booklist