Marching on Washington, Lucy Barber(Berkley: University of California Press) 2004When Jacob Coxey's army marched into Washington, D.C., in 1894, observers didn't know what to make of this concerted effort by citizens to use the capital for national public protest. By 1971, however, when thousands marched to protest the war in Vietnam, what had once been outside the political order had become an American political norm. Lucy G. Barber's lively, erudite history explains just how this tactic achieved its transformation from unacceptable to legitimate. Barber shows how such highly visible events contributed to the development of a broader and more inclusive view of citizenship and transformed the capital from the exclusive domain of politicians and officials into a national stage for Americans to participate directly in national politics.

Coxey's Army, Carlos Schwantes (Moscow Idaho: Idaho University Press), 1984. On May 1, 1894, Jacob S. Coxey led an army of tattered, hungry, unemployed people from western and mid-western states to Washington, D.C., to persuade Congress and President Cleveland to create public works and increase the money supply to stimulate the economy. Coxey was a prosperous small town businessman who believed the federal government needed to invest in a nationwide system of Good Roads which would employ thousands of those put out of work by the Panic of 1893. Schwantes not only chronicles this populist phenomenon, but describes the emergence of some eight other industrial armies that sought to join Coxey's Army on their May Day march up Pennsylvania Avenue.

Alice Paul and the American Suffrage Campaign, Katherine H. Adams and Michael L. Keene (Champaign,Il.:University of Illinois Press) 2007.Chronicles dramatic techniques that Paul deftly used to gain publicity for the suffrage movement. Stunningly woven into the narrative are accounts of many instances in which women were in physical danger. Rather than avoid discussion of Paul's imprisonment, hunger strikes, and forced feeding, the authors divulge the strategies she employed in her campaign. Paul's controversial approach, the authors assert, was essential in changing American attitudes toward suffrage.The full story of the final decade of the women's suffrage movement has yet to be told and understood, and Alice Paul and the National Women's Party (NWP) have been particularly neglected. This work does an excellent job bringing this history to the reader in a highly engaging manner. The book provides a detailed look at the behind-the-scenes processes of NWP's lobbying effort.

The Bonus Army: An American Epic, Paul Dickinson and Thomas Allen (New York: Walker and Company)2006.In the summer of 1932, at the height of the Depression, some forty-five thousand World War I veterans—whites and blacks together—descended on Washington D.C., from all over the country to demand the bonus promised them eight years earlier for their wartime service. Fearing violence after the Senate defeated the "bonus bill," Herbert Hoover's Army Chief of Staff, Douglas MacArthur, led tanks through the streets on July 28 to evict the bonus marchers. Through seminal research, including interviews with the last surviving witnesses, Paul Dickson and Thomas B. Allen tell the full story of the Bonus Army, recovering the voices of ordinary men who dared tilt at powerful injustice. The march ultimately transformed the nation, inspiring Congress to pass the GI Bill of Rights in 1944, one of the most important pieces of social legislation in our history, which in large part created America's middle class.

A Philip Randolph: A Life in the Vanguard, Andrew E. Kersten (New York: Rowman and Littlefeld Publishers) 2006. Before the emergence of Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr, there were several key leaders who fought for civil rights in the US. Among them was A Philip Randolph, who perhaps best embodied the hopes, ideals, and aspirations of black Americans. This book explores Randolph's influences and accomplishments as both a labor and civil rights leader.

Eyes on the Prize, Juan Williams (New York: Penguin Books) 1988 Arguably the most tumultuous time in recent American history, the Civil Rights years inspired the most rational and irrational of human behaviors and set the stage for sweeping reform in the nation's race relations. Juan Williams's moving chronicle of the movement stands as the definitive history of the era. Eyes on the Prize offers important lessons about the power of ordinary citizens to shape democracy.