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Rebel Youth

1960s Labour Unrest, Young Workers, and New Leftists in English Canada

Ian Milligan author

Format:Paperback

Publisher:University of British Columbia Press

Published:15th Jan '15

Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back

Rebel Youth cover

An important look at the young workers and New Leftists who formed an essential – but often unacknowledged – part of the youth movement that changed the country in the 1960s.

Rebel Youth draws important connections between the stories of young workers and the youth movement in Canada, claiming a central place for labour and class in the legacy of the 1960s.

During the “long sixties,” baby boomers raised on democratic postwar ideals demanded a more egalitarian society for all. While a few became vocal leaders at universities across Canada, nearly 90% of Canada’s young people went straight to work after high school. There, they brought the anti-authoritarian spirit of the youth revolt to the labour movement.

While university-based activists combined youth culture with a new brand of radicalism to form the New Left, young workers were pressing for wildcat strikes and defying their aging union leaders in a wave of renewed militancy. In Rebel Youth, Ian Milligan looks at these converging currents, demonstrating convincingly how they were part of a single youth phenomenon.

With just short of seventy interviews complementing the extensive use of archival records from ten different cities, this book claims a central place for labour and class in the legacy of the Canadian sixties.

A highly readable and important work that brings young Canadians who were in the workforce – rather than attending university – into the conversation about what the social and cultural upheavals of the 1960s were all about. -- James Pitsula, author of New World Dawning: The Sixties at Regina Campus
...Milligan’s study is a welcome addition to the growing literature on the long sixties, which highlights the diversity and complexity of the era that has heretofore escaped popular memories of it. -- Kevin Brushett, Royal Military College of Canada * British Journal of Canadian Studies, Vol. 29 No. 2, Fall 2016 *

  • Short-listed for The Sir John A. Macdonald Prize, Canadian Historical Association 2015 (Canada)

ISBN: 9780774826884

Dimensions: unknown

Weight: 380g

252 pages