Jackson Lears

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Jackson Lears

T.J. Jackson Lears is the Board of Governors Distinguished Professor of History at Rutgers University and the editor of Raritan: A Quarterly Review. Lears’s essays and reviews have appeared in The Nation, The New Republic, The London Review of Books, and The New York Review of Books. His books include Something for Nothing: Luck in America; Fables of Abundance: A Cultural History of Advertising in America, which won the LA Times book prize for history; and most recently, Animal Spirits: The American Pursuit of Vitality from Camp Meeting to Wall Street.

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Through thirty interconnected chapters, it draws out the strategies, failures, turning points, and hard-won wisdom of a movement that called itself the Revolutionary Participatory Society. These are not the polished memoirs of politicians: they are the unfiltered accounts of people who organized in neighborhoods, hospitals, universities, stadiums, courthouses, and places of worship, and kept a shared vision alive through cynicism and exhaustion.

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