Year: 2016

The successful conclusion of Kuwait’s Blue Revolution came on May 17th, 2005 when Kuwaiti women gained suffrage after more than 40 years of struggle. The women used a wide variety of approaches to achieve their goals, including lobbying, introducing repeated legislation, protests and demonstration, marches, rallies, and mock elections. Like many women’s suffrage movements around […]

I teach and write in the field of Peace and Conflict Studies, with a special focus on strategic nonviolence. It is a rich field, growing in its scholarship and its widespread usage. I’m so enthused by this—the more we wage our conflicts with nonviolence the lower the costs. Counting the costs of conflict, we normally […]

By May 1961, federal law had already ruled that segregation on interstate, public buses was illegal. Southern states, however, maintained segregation in seating, and at bus station bathrooms, waiting rooms and drinking fountains. The Interstate Commerce Commission refused to take action to enforce federal law. To change this, the Civil Rights Movement (CORE, SNCC, NAACP) […]

Happy Mother’s Day to my incredible, artistic, courageous, wonderful mother, Kate Simonds! Bouquets of Mother by Rivera Sun My mother, Kathryn, a name standing tall on two feet strong like the black coffee she drank. My mother drove tractors and wrangled five children through chores last minute homework breakfast cereal dish duty and onto the […]

We should celebrate the effective and versatile tactic of the teach-in. One of the largest teach-ins during the Vietnam War, for example, was held on May 21st-23rd, 1965 at UC Berkeley with 10-30,000 students attending. The State Department was invited to send a representative, but declined. An empty chair was set on the stage during […]

This is an excerpt from Rivera Sun’s novel, The Dandelion Insurrection, featuring a moment when Zadie Byrd Gray commits to being a love-motivated changemaker and living up to her inner potential. Find the whole novel here. “There are three hundred million people in this country and someone has to pull their love from the womb […]

“In all my career I have never advocated violence. I want to give the nation a more highly developed citizenship.” – Mother Jones This week commemorates the anniversary of the Haymarket Affair, International Workers’ Day, and the claimed birthday of Mother Mary Harris Jones.  While the United States’ official Labor Day falls in September, the […]

As we commemorate Earth Day on April 22nd, we are called upon to recommit to protect our planet, and ensure that the human species and our fellow beings will have a long-term future. Founded in 1970, Earth Day is an internationally celebrated day, honoring the natural systems of the planet, and a day of action […]

Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan was born on Feb 6th, 1890 in the Peshawar Valley of British-controlled India. At the age of twenty, Ghaffar Khan founded a village mosque school, and began his revolutionary work against British colonial control with what his contemporary Mohandas K. Gandhi was calling “constructive programme”. He worked tirelessly for independence and […]

The name Helen Keller conjures up, for most people, a deaf-blind-mute girl learning to communicate via sign language. It’s a scene straight out of The Miracle Worker, the biographical play recounting Anne Sullivan’s role in reaching young Helen Keller. But the miraculous part of Keller’s story is not that the way she learned to fingerspell […]

On April 16th, 1963, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was sitting in a stark jail cell in Birmingham, Alabama, where he had been arrested for engaging in nonviolent direct action. An ally had smuggled a newspaper into the jail that contained the recently published piece, A Call To Unity, written by eight local white clergymen […]

“Non-violence is not inaction. It is not discussion. It is not for the timid or weak… Non-violence is hard work. It is the willingness to sacrifice. It is the patience to win.” – Cesar Chavez Cesar Chavez was born on March 31st, 1927 in Yuma, Arizona. When his family lost their land and farm during […]

The next time someone calls you a treehugger, say thank you . . . then proceed to tell them the origins of the treehuggers. In 1730, in India, local villagers of the Bishnoi sect, led by a woman named Amrita Devi, threw their arms around the trunks of a sacred forest, trying to protect the […]

St. Patrick’s Day is nearly here, and while many will be headed to pubs with shamrocks pinned to their jackets to celebrate all things Irish, there is one contribution from Ireland that bears a toast (or two!): the boycott. Coined in 1880 during the Irish Land Wars, the phrase refers to Captain Charles Boycott, a […]

This is an excerpt from Rivera Sun’s novel, The Dandelion Insurrection, featuring a moment when Zadie Byrd Gray commits to being a love-motivated changemaker and living up to her inner potential. Find the whole novel here. That afternoon, Zadie’s mother had delivered an ultimatum to her girl. “There is a whole new way of life […]

By the time the historic Selma March occurred on March 21st, 1965, more than 3,000 protesters in Selma, Alabama had already been arrested, and demonstrators had twice begun the fated march, once to be turned back by heavy repression in an event known as “Bloody Sunday”. On March 7th, 1965, a group of marchers organized […]

Nonviolent struggle is on the rise globally. Neither passive, nor inaction, this powerful way of working for change is proving Gandhi’s audacious claim that “nonviolence is the greatest force at the disposal of mankind” to be correct. Here are ten things you should know about nonviolent struggle and how it works. 1. Nonviolent action is […]

Many on St. Patrick’s Day will be headed to pubs with shamrocks pinned to their jackets to celebrate all things Irish, there is one contribution from Ireland that bears a toast (or two!): the boycott. Coined in 1880 during the Irish Land Wars, the phrase refers to Captain Charles Boycott, a land agent for Lord […]

The next time someone calls you a treehugger, say thank you . . . then proceed to tell them the origins of the treehuggers. In 1730, in India, local villagers of the Bishnoi sect, led by a woman named Amrita Devi, threw their arms around the trunks of a sacred forest, trying to protect the […]

Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan was born on Feb 6th, 1890 in the Peshawar Valley of British-controlled India. At the age of twenty, Ghaffar Khan founded a village mosque school, and began his revolutionary work against British colonial control with what his contemporary Mohandas K. Gandhi was calling “constructive programme”. He worked tirelessly for independence and […]

In April 1940, the Nazis invaded Norway and occupied the country. In 1942, as part of an attempt to implement a fascist curriculum in the schools, Minister-President Vidkun Quisling, a Norwegian collaborator, disbanded the existing teachers’ union and required all teachers to register with the new Norwegian Teachers’ Union by February 5th. Between 8,000-10,000 of […]

In 1943, Joseph Goebbels promised Adolf Hitler that Berlin would be Judenfrei – Jew free – in time for Hitler’s birthday. On February 27th, without warning, Jews were snatched off the streets and from workplaces, and held in buildings temporarily before being loaded onto trains to be sent to their deaths in the concentration camps. […]

“We are tired of war. We are tired of running. We are tired of begging for bulgur wheat. We are tired of our children being raped. We are now taking this stand, to secure the future of our children. Because we believe, as custodians of society, tomorrow our children will ask us, “Mama, what was […]

“What the woman who labors wants is the right to live, not simply exist — the right to life as the rich woman has the right to life, and the sun and music and art. You have nothing that the humblest worker has not a right to have also. The worker must have bread, but […]