Sweet Land of Liberty

One of the most significant trends in the study of civil rights in the last decade and more has been the expansion of our conception of what the movement was and when it happened. Serious historians long ago abandoned the 1954-1968, Brown-to-Memphis chronology of the movement. And thanks in no small part to historians such as the University of Pennsylvania's Thomas Sugrue we now know a great deal more about the ways in which the struggle for racial equality was not confined to the South. In this weekend's New York Times Book Review Alan Wolfe assesses Sugrue's important new book Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North.