ABSTRACT
The author's era has been haunted by Walter Benjamin's image of the angel of History. Much of what has been called "progress" is undoubtedly a continuing catastrophe. But it cannot be blamed on a storm blowing from beyond the earth. History is made by living people interacting in the world. If a storm is piling up wreckage, that storm is the product of our own action. The most important story of the past half century is that of ordinary people organizing to transform the way society looked at workers, unjust war, women, people of color, and the environment. The rapid acceleration of global warming and other environmental threats in the early twenty-first century intensifed fears for human survival.
