The American Radical tells the story of American democracy from the late 18th century to the present through the lives of the women and men who have fought to advance it.

Popular Front columnist and New Deal propagandist, fearless opponent of McCarthyism and feared scourge of official liars, I. F. Stone (1907–1989)—magnetic, witty, indefatigable—left a permanent mark on our politics and culture. A college dropout, he was already an influential newsman by the age of twenty-five, enjoying extraordinary access to key figures in Washington and New York. Guttenplan finds the key to Stone’s achievements throughout his singular career—not just in the celebrated I. F. Stone’s Weekly—lay in the force and passion of his political commitments. Stone’s calm and forensic yet devastating reports on American politics and institutions sprang from a radical faith in the long-term prospects for American democracy. In an era when the old radical questions—about war, the economy, health care, and the right to dissent—are suddenly new again, Guttenplan’s lively, provocative book makes clear why so many of Stone’s pronouncements have acquired the force of prophecy.

An anthology of writings by various authors which help explore the persistence and significance of the American radical tradition throughout history.

What this all adds up to is the reestablishment of "freedom"--freedom to be ourselves, to have the right to our feelings, to have the right to our own thoughts, to have the right to free speech on whatever it is that we have to say and to say it whenever and wherever we find ourselves, to have the right to see the truth in all things as we are able to perceive it, and to deliberately recognize the reality that surrounds us as we engage in the continual struggle for genuineness. "Keeping it real" is good for all people without this faculty, fantasy, and prevarication takeover. Our culture is our social environment. We need to have the power and the will to protect it. It is the womb of our civilization. Our innately personal ideals as well as our interpersonal social norms, mores, and colloquialism--our national integrity is being cancelled out by the corrupt regime in Congress and the federal courts. We all have the right to live within the society and culture we were born into at the very least--the right to our own individuality, to our own opinions, and to express our love of who and what we are. Unfortunately, the current phase that the federal government has lapsed into is one of denying all of these rights to the degree that the Bill of Rights is superseded. Citizenship has become superfluous. It is time to get radical. It is past time for citizens to revolt. Otherwise, this will soon become no different than any other oppressed country with the federal tyranny of the D. C. Treason Regime.

The eighteen essays and speeches in Take Hold of Our History render a manifesto – a call to remember, redeem, and embrace the American radical story and tradition in favor of cultivating American historical memory and imagination and making America radical once again. For too long we have allowed the right to hijack the past and suppress, efface, lie about, and/or appropriate the essentially radical story of America from the struggles of the Revolution to those of the Age of Roosevelt and the 1960s. And no less tragically, we on the left, apparently haunted by the worst of our national experience, have turned our back on our own story and deferred to the tales of conservatives and reactionaries. Fleeing from the past, we merely compound the tragedies and ironies of American history, for we turn our backs on both the nation’s democratic creed and radical imperative, but also the struggles from the bottom up, the struggles in which working people and others have laid hold of America’s revolutionary promise and succeeded in making the United States freer, more equal and more democratic, at times, radically so. As Bill Moyers put it in 2008: “Here in the first decade of the twenty-first century the story that becomes America’s dominant narrative will shape our collective imagination and our politics for a long time.” The time has come for us to advance that narrative.