Orion A. Teal

Graduate Student

Department of History

Duke University

 

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I am a PhD candidate in history at Duke University. My dissertation, Building a Better World: Youth, Radicalism, and the Politics of Space in New York, 1945-1965, examines how radical activists in New York City carved out space for young people's participation in leftwing political culture at the height of Cold War anticommunism. Contrary to most studies of the postwar Red Scare that focus on the Left's decline, my project reveals that a surprisingly robust radical social world survived the era of McCarthyism. In summer camps, private schools, youth groups, cultural organizations, union halls, and radicals' homes throughout New York City and its environs, youth continued to learn from Socialists, Communists, and other non-conformists despite efforts by social critics and governmental officials to curtail their influence. The project is unique, therefore, not only for documenting the hidden history of young people's involvement in the 1950s Left, but also for demonstrating how this generation helped shape the cultural and political revolts of the 1960s, an era that continues to shape the politics of the present.