Martin Luther King and LBJ had a complicated relationship. As the predominant civil rights leader of his era, King was instrumental in getting the president to overcome political concerns and get c...

There are poor people in America, wrote Harrington, millions and millions of them. But most of us never see the "unskilled workers, the migrant farm workers, the aged, the minorities, and all the o...

Pesticides kill bugs, but what else do they do? Rachel Carson explained the dire consequences of our reliance on chemicals in her 1962 book Silent Spring. Spring was silent because no birds sang. T...

Their name says it all. This student-led organization of the New Left gained notoriety for some of its more radical beliefs. But its 1962 manifesto, the Port Huron Statement, touched on some of the...

Goldwater was LBJ's dream opponent in the 1964 election. An unapologetic ultra-conservative, Goldwater criticized the Great Society as a tyrannical intrusion of Big Brother into the lives of freedo...

One of the "winners" of the Goldwater debacle was Ronald Reagan. Reagan launched his own political career with an October 1964 speech supporting Goldwater for president.Reagan directly attacked the...