ABSTRACT
Like many people interested in student activism and resistance, I was first fascinated by the subject when I was a student; the idealism of youthful twenty-somethings who wanted to make the world a better place in some way, the war stories of older friends who had taken partor wished that they had-in demonstrations in the 1960s, and the cul-- tural myths surrounding student actions: all intrigued me. Student resistance was exotic in an era when political activism on U.S. campuses had become, well, quixotic. In discussions with current student activists, I noticed that many could refer to student heroes, movements, and organizations (recalling that the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Com-- mittee [SNCC], for instance, worked for civil rights or that the Weather-- men were terrorists), but such cultural knowledge tended to be vague, and often limited to 1960s efforts in the United States and France. And once I began exploring the subject in libraries, I discovered that I had to immerse myself, become a student activist scholar of sorts, before I could even begin to piece together a general history of student activism. Many books studied specific student movements, mostly those occur-- ring in 1968 and 1969, in depth, but to learn about the subject generally, one had to work through numerous books, memoirs, analyses, and arti-- cles. It took me a long time to build a lexicon of student resistance; no current text offered a general global history.
