Rebel Youth
1960s Labour Unrest, Young Workers, and New Leftists in English Canada
Format:Paperback
Publisher:University of British Columbia Press
Published:15th Jan '15
Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back
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