Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World Highlight

What if, instead of stories about Oedipal family disputes and youthful self-expression, or even instead of legislative compromises arcing toward justice, we saw the interrelated U.S. campus, antiwar, and civil rights movements of the postwar period as part of the global struggle against domination by Western capital? A lot of things start to make sense, such as why the Black Panthers sold Mao’s little red book, trained in Algeria, and escaped to Cuba. And why campus radicals flew the North Vietnamese flag. And why Malcolm X wanted to take black people’s case to the United Nations instead of to the White House. For U.S. rebels in the third quarter of the twentieth century, decolonization started at home.