Gitlin on the cover of Letters to a Young Activist

Dr. Todd Gitlin is an American sociologist, political writer, novelist, and cultural commentator. He has written voluminously on the media, politics, intellectual life and the arts, in public as well as scholarly venues. He is a former president of Students for a Democratic Society and helped organize the first national demonstration against the Vietnam war, as well as the first civil disobedience directed against American corporate support for the apartheid regime in South Africa. Gitlin attended Harvard University, the University of Michigan and the University of California-Berkeley and is currently a professor of journalism and sociology at Columbia University. Image File history File linksMetadata Letters_to_a_Young_Activist_(cover). ... Image File history File linksMetadata Letters_to_a_Young_Activist_(cover). ... The Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) was a radical student activist movement in the United states founded in 1959. ... Harvard University is a private university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA and a member of the Ivy League. ... University of Michigan, Ann Arbor The University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (U-M, U of M, or U-Mich) is a public coeducational university in Michigan, United States. ... The University of California, Berkeley (also known as Cal, UC Berkeley, UCB, or simply Berkeley) is a prestigious, public, coeducational university situated in the foothills of Berkeley, California to the east of San Francisco Bay, overlooking the Golden Gate and its bridge. ... A professor (Latin: one who claims publicly to be an expert) (prof for short) is a senior teacher, lecturer and researcher, usually in a college or university. ... Journalism is a discipline of collecting, verifying, analyzing and presenting information gathered regarding current events, including trends, issues and people. ... Social interactions of people and their consequences are the subject of sociology studies. ... Columbia University is a private university in the Morningside Heights neighborhood of Manhattan, New York City. ...

Quote

My generation of the New Left--a generation that grew as the [Vietnam] war went on--relinquished any title to patriotism without much sense of loss. All that was left to the Left was to unearth righteous traditions and cultivate them in universities. The much-mocked political correctness of the next academic generations was a consolation prize. We lost--we squandered the politics--but won the textbooks.

from "Varieties of Patriotic Experience"

Books by Todd Gitlin

• Uptown: Poor Whites in Chicago (1970)
• Busy Being Born (1974)
• The Whole World is Watching: Mass Media in the Making and Unmaking of the Left (1981)
• Inside Prime Time (1983)
• The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage (1987)
• Watching Television, editor (1987)
• The Murder of Albert Einstein (1992)
• The Twilight of Common Dreams: Why America is Wracked by Culture Wars (1995) ISBN 0805040919.
• Sacrifice (1999)
• Media Unlimited: How the Torrent of Images and Sounds Overwhelms Our Lives (2002)
• Letters To a Young Activist (2003)
• "Varieties of Patriotic Experience," in The Fight Is for Democracy: Winning the War of Ideas in America and the World, ed. George Packer (New York: Perennial, 2003). ISBN 0060532491
• The Intellectuals and the Flag (2006)