By the Light of Burning Dreams: The Triumphs and Tragedies of the Second American Revolution

Salon.com founder and former editor-in-chief David Talbot and his sister Margaret, a longtime staff writer at the New Yorker, together explore the potential landscape of the 1960s and 1970s. Based on exclusive interviews, original documents, and archival research, By the Light of Burning Dreams explores critical moments in the lives of a diverse cast of iconoclastic leaders of the 20th-century radical movement.

Join us for our conversation moderated by Nikki Silva as she explores with Margaret and David Talbot and our panelists Madonna Thunder Hawk, Dolores Huerta, Heather Booth, and Bill Zimmerman, the epiphanies that galvanized these modern revolutionaries and created unexpected connections and alliances between individual movements and across race, class, and gender divides.

Co-sponsored by The Humanities Institute and the Institute for Social Transformation.

Authors

David Talbot (Stevenson, ’73) is a journalist, author, activist, and independent historian.

Margaret Talbot is an essayist, non-fiction writer, and staff writer at The New Yorker.

Panel

Madonna Thunder Hawk is an activist and a veteran of every modern Native occupation from Alcatraz, to Wounded Knee in 1973, and more recently the NODAPL protest at Standing Rock.

Bill Zimmerman is a political consultant and author, who managed Tom Hayden’s campaign for the U.S. Senate in the 1976 California primary.

Heather Booth is a civil rights activist, feminist, and political strategist and has been heavily involved in progressive causes.

Dolores Huerta is a co-founder of the United Farm Workers and recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom; she has played a major role in the civil rights movement for over 50 years.

Moderator

Nikki Silva (Porter, ’73) is co-executive producer of the public radio team, The Kitchen Sisters, who are creators of hundreds of stories for NPR and public broadcast. Her current NPR and podcast series is the Keepers.

About the Book

The political landscape of the 1960s and 1970s was perhaps one of the most tumultuous in America’s history, shaped by the fight for civil rights, women’s liberation, Black power, and the end to the Vietnam War. In many ways, this second American revolution was a belated fulfillment of the betrayed promises of the first, striving to extend the full protections of the Bill of Rights to non-white, non-male, non-elite Americans excluded by the nation’s founders.

Based on exclusive interviews, original documents, and archival research, By the Light of Burning Dreams explores critical moments in the lives of a diverse cast of iconoclastic leaders of the twentieth century radical movement: Bobby Seale of the Black Panthers; Heather Booth and the Jane Collective, the first underground feminist abortion clinic; Vietnam War peace activists Tom Hayden and Jane Fonda; Cesar Chavez, Dolores Huerta and the United Farm Workers; Craig Rodwell and the Gay Pride movement; Dennis Banks, Madonna Thunder Hawk, Russell Means and the warriors of Wounded Knee; and John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s politics of stardom. Margaret and David Talbot reveal the epiphanies that galvanized these modern revolutionaries and created unexpected connections and alliances between individual movements and across race, class, and gender divides.  

America is still absorbing—and reacting against—the revolutionary forces of this tumultuous period. The change these leaders enacted demanded much of American society and the human imagination. By the Light of Burning Dreams is an immersive and compelling narrative of seven lighting rods of change and the generation that engraved itself in American history—and set the stage for those today, fighting to bend forward the arc of American history.