A general history of radical movements that were intended to challenge varied forms of inequality, domination, exploitation, or violence, and to foster some kind of emancipatory reconstruction of American life and government. With some attention to early forms of artisans´ and workingmen´s radicalism, as well as the antebellum abolitionist and women´s rights movement, we will focus on the development and the fate of a modern Left; from the labor, anarchist, socialist, and communist movements through the Black freedom struggle and the New Left of the 1960s, feminism, and beyond. We will try to understand the aspirations and ideas, forms of organization and activism, dilemmas and weaknesses, relations to mainstream politics and repressive authority, successes and failures in each of these cases. The course will conclude with a study of radicalism in the late 20th century, from women´s, environmentalist, and antiwar activism of the 1980s to the organization of street protests in response to "globalization," signaled dramatically in Seattle, early December 1999; and we will consider the recent condition of a Left at low ebb.