Common Ground: A Modern Times Anthology
- ISBN-10
- 1632923424
- ISBN-13
- 9781632923424
- Series
- Common Ground
- Language
- English
- Published
- 2022-04-12
- Authors
- David Stromberg, M. Margaret Anderson
Description
Founded by immigration lawyer Read Lewis, author Louis Adamic, and educator M. Margaret Anderson, Common Ground was published by the Common Council for American Unity, an offshoot of the Division of Work with the Foreign Born, which began as a government agency in 1918. By 1940, when the organization was adapted to the cultural landscape of the time and began to publish its quarterly magazine, WWII had already broken out and the United States was reeling from the fallout of the Great Depression as well as the rise of global military threats. And while it incorporated these two internationally cataclysmic events into its editorial focus, Common Ground was more interested in how they influenced what was happening within America - in how the crises of the times interacted with endemic racial, ethnic, and economic inequalities on the national level.As a magazine, Common Ground integrated the demands of both literature and activism. It featured some of the most prominent figures of its time, but its core writing was produced by a community of authors, educators, and activists who reported from the field-social justice warriors whose names have been all but forgotten. Theirs are the voices that fill this anthology: writers who exposed readers to experiences that were far beyond what was experienced by most Americans, and whose names have were later eclipsed by the mainstream cultural establishment.
