When the Old Left Was Young: Student Radicals and America's First Mass Student Movement, 1929-1941
| Author | Robert Cohen |
|---|---|
| Published | 1993 |
| Format | Book |
TL;DR — Historian Robert Cohen’s 1993 account of the 1930s American student movement, its anti-war and left-wing politics and its collapse by 1941.
Published by Oxford University Press in 1993 (paperback 1997), the book grew out of Cohen’s UC Berkeley history dissertation and draws on FBI files he obtained on the student movement. It traces the Depression-era student left, the National Student League, the Student League for Industrial Democracy and the American Student Union, through campus anti-war strikes, the Oxford Pledge, battles over free speech and the Spanish Civil War.
Cohen argues this was America’s first mass student protest movement, a generation before the 1960s, and follows its break-up under the strain of the Nazi-Soviet Pact and the coming of the Second World War.
What it is: a well-regarded academic history from a university press. In-print book; no open copy found.
Where this came from
- A copy saved in October 2026.
455 pages. A PDF copy is held in Kyle’s private archive; it is not linked or shared here.