Americas Revolutionary Heritage [Paperback]

George Novack (Author, Editor)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 1, 1976

A historical materialist analysis of the genocide against Native Americans, the American Revolution, the Civil War, the rise of industrial capitalism, and the first wave of the fight for women's rights.

Index. Now with enlarged type.

Product Details

• Paperback: 471 pages
• Publisher: Pathfinder Pr; 2nd Revised edition edition (June 1, 1976)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0873484657
• ISBN-13: 978-0873484657
• Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 5.1 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #789,512 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Fighters from our past to help fights for our future, May 24, 2002

By 

Tony Thomas (SUNNY ISLES BEACH, FL USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Americas Revolutionary Heritage (Paperback)

There are a lot of writers of history who claim to be Marxist. Most of them are academics that simply see Marxism as an angle for them to hold onto cushy university jobs.
This is the most important work of American history by a real Marxist. George Novack was a real Marxist, a fighter to build the real struggles for workers, Blacks, women, Latinos, and other oppressed in the world. Like a real Marxist, like Marx, he worked not on gaining a university chair, but in fighting to build an international revolutionary movement of Socialist Workers. He fought to free the Scottsboro Boys, he worked directly with Leon Trotsky, to expose the crimes of Stalin's Moscow trials, he defended worker militants who would not succumb to FDR's war drive, he worked to publicize the ideas of Che Guevera, Fidel Castro, Malcolm X, and he was a key figure in the struggle to expose the FBI's Cointelpro. He fought this capitalism for 50 years!!!
This is real Marxist history because as a fighter, Novack understood the real lives, the real struggles, the real history of all the American revolutionary fighters in this history and many besides. That is why this book is not just a nice look at our past, but a tool workers, youth, intellectuals, not just in the USA, but around the world can use to fight for a future where the world is ruled by working people and farmers, not by the filthy rich.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars For the unsung heroes, the rank-and-file makers of history, February 2, 2002

By 

Mark Charles (Nebraska) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Americas Revolutionary Heritage (Paperback)

I first read this book while taking U.S. history in high school. A friend recommended it as an antidote to the required text. I am not exaggerating when I say this book saved me from emerging from that course muddled in confusion about this country's past. Now that I have become a teacher I rely on it.

Recently a colleague criticized the U.S. history textbook currently used in our school for giving too much prominence to Crispus Attucks. This African American sailor escaped from slavery and later became the first to fall under a hail of British bullets in the Boston Massacre of 1770. She complained the four paragraph biography and picture of him in the school textbook was "multiculturalism run amuck." Thanks to what I learned in America's Revolutionary Heritage I was able to answer her by explaining that, on the contrary, it was Attucks and thousands of ordinary people like him -- too often dismissed as "the rabble" -- who were decisive in the making of the first American revolution. Novack shows how when the well-to-do colonialists, the merchants and plantation owners -- the ones most often featured in the writing of U.S. history -- waffled on independence from Britain, it was the servants, sailors, small farmers, carpenters, day laborers and mechanics who stood fast and pushed the movement forward.

Malcolm X once said, "Of all our studies, history is best qualified to reward our research." An understanding of our history can be a great weapon in the fight for social justice. This book was written as such a tool for the "rabble," the modern-day Crispus Attuckses, to arm them with an awareness of their power as the unsung heroes, the true shapers of history.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars U.S. History for Workers, June 2, 2002

By 

David Salner (Frederick, MD United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Americas Revolutionary Heritage (Paperback)

Do you know why the capitalist rulers broke virtually every promise to Native Americans as they waged genocidal wars against them? Who made the American Revolution? How did this great liberation struggle give way to the solidification of slavery? How did the slavocracy rise to become a world power, only to meet defeat at the hands of the industrial capitalist class, which proceeded to enforce brutal apartheid-like conditions on freed Blacks? How did the U.S. monopolists rise to their position as the world's mightiest-and last-empire? This book gives the scientific answers workers need to know.If not available from Amazon, booksfrompathfinder will have it--click on "new and used" near the top of the page.