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ICFRC: RESISTANCE: Reclaiming an American Tradition

Listen to an audio podcast of this program.

Jeff Biggers is the American Book Award-winning author of several works of history, memoir, journalism, and theater, including The United States of Appalachia, praised by the Citizen Times as a "masterpiece of popular history"; State Out of the Union, selected by Publishers Weekly as a Top Ten Social Science book in 2012; and Reckoning at Eagle Creek, winner of the Delta Prize for Literature and David Brower Award for Environmental Reporting.

Biggers is the founder of the Climate Narrative Project, an arts and advocacy project for schools, universities and organizations. From 2014-2017, he served as the Sustainability Writer-in-Residence at the University of Iowa. He also served as the Campbell-Stripling Distinguished Writer-in-Residence at Wesleyan College in Georgia. Over the past decade, Biggers has given lectures, readings and performances at over 100 universities and colleges across the country, from the University of California in Berkeley to the University of Mississippi to Yale University. He has delivered keynote addresses at numerous literary, educational, urban planning, and environmental conferences and serves as a contributing editor to The Bloomsbury Review, and is a member of the PEN American Center.

"In a riveting and inspiring narrative history, Jeff Biggers' Resistance reframes today's battles as a continuum of a vibrant American tradition, chronicling the courageous and often squabbling resistance movements that insured the benchmarks of our democracy-and served on the front lines of the American Revolution, the defense of the Constitution and Bill of Rights, the defeat of fascism during World War II, and various civil rights movements. Resistance is a provocative reconsideration of the American Revolution and its unfolding promises. It brings to life early Native American, African American and immigrant struggles, women's rights, and the pioneering environmental justice movements and their presence today. Biggers shows how a republic of resistance has served as a de facto "Truth and Reconciliation" commission for our history, especially in times when our nation-and its leaders-need to be held accountable."

For more information on the Foreign Relations Council visit their website at www.icfrc.org.

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