This impressively comprehensive survey traces the practice and theory of civil disobedience in the United States from the eighteenth century to the present. Violating the law “in the name of a higher morality” is, according to Perry, “a distinctive American tradition” that flourished in every age and achieved special prominence in the decades before the Civil War and in the 1960s (1). Perry moves deftly from abolition to Occupy, from campaigns against Indian removal to Operation Rescue, touching en route on women's rights, temperance, pacifism, labor organizing, and other impulses for social transformation.

Several thematic arguments give shape to Perry's chronological narrative. The first is encapsulated in the subtitle: gently resisting the “transnational” tendencies of other American studies scholars, Perry insists on the American provenance of civil disobedience. This approach to social change appeals to democracy-loving Americans because it is “civil” as well as “disobedient.” It allows the activist to affirm the general validity of democratic institutions even while violating specific unjust laws. Perry's stress on the Americanness of civil disobedience helps him underscore its character as a tradition that is continuous over time. Too much emphasis on the “Gandhian” character of civil rights, for example, would obscure its homegrown reliance on abolitionist precedents. On the other hand, Perry's approach obscures the profoundly cosmopolitan sensibilities of most civil disobedients. In the abolitionist era, Henry David Thoreau read the sacred texts of India, William Lloyd Garrison declared that “our country is the world,” and William Wells Brown began resisting Jim Crow segregation after experiencing integration in England. Their twentieth-century successors filled their homes with icons of Mohandas Gandhi, Oscar Romero, and Nelson Mandela. Few imagined that the United States was the only arena for their activism.

A second guiding theme is the religious origin of civil disobedience. Though many activists claim the Boston Tea Party as inspiration, Perry suggests that it was less influential than the refusal of eighteenth-century Baptists to pay church taxes. Shortly before abolitionists began using civil disobedience on a large scale, a group of protestant missionaries to the Cherokee accepted imprisonment rather than comply with the Jacksonian policy of Indian removal. I found these stories to be the most exciting part of the book, but they raise questions. If eighteenth-century Baptists in New England are part of the story, why not sixteenth-century Anabaptists in Switzerland? And if the Baptist campaign against state religion launched the tradition, why were Baptists proportionately under-represented in subsequent civil disobedience campaigns, while establishmentarian Congregationalists and Unitarians were over-represented? (The even more over-represented Quakers might offer a clue, since they had both an anti-establishmentarian theology and a heritage of quasi-establishment in Pennsylvania.)

Perry's training as an intellectual historian informs a third theme. He is fascinated with the theory underlying civil disobedience, and repeatedly skewers activists for seeking to circumscribe it within a narrow definition. Civil disobedience, he insists, has never been restricted to pacifists. Though nineteenth-century nonresistants made important contributions to the tradition, so too did the decidedly non-pacifist Frederick Douglass and Henry David Thoreau. Martin Luther King, Jr., kept a gun in his home throughout the Montgomery bus boycott. Many successful campaigns have been run by people whose commitment to nonviolence was purely tactical. A more plausible common thread is an underlying commitment to a lawful society, expressed in the willingness to accept punishment for violating unjust laws. But activists have given many different reasons for doing this: abolitionists often appealed to a “higher law,” while Gandhians aspired to change the hearts of oppressors.

The greatest challenge in any comprehensive history is narrating the portion that occurred within the author's lifetime. In telling the story of the 1960s, Perry makes admirable use of his own family's experiences to add nuance to a familiar story. He also gives a clear sense of the proliferation of civil disobedience in the years since 1970, highlighting its use in the anti-abortion, GLBTQ liberation, environmental, anti-nuclear, immigrant rights, anti-globalization, and Occupy movements, as well as in opposition to Central American and Middle Eastern wars. But all of this is compressed into a distressingly small space: the most recent sixth of American history occupies only a tenth of Perry's narrative. He attends to the intellectual nuances of civil disobedience in the anti-abortion movement, but reduces all the others to mere examples of diversity.

This is unfortunate, because most of them introduced new themes into the tradition. By sabotaging complex weapons system and thus earning lengthy prison terms, the Plowshares movement blended activism with prison ministry, and also created intentional communities devoted to supporting individuals for whom civil disobedience was a lifelong vocation. The environmental movement, like the labor movement before it, used civil disobedience to challenge corporate as well as state power, and Perry would have done well to trace the lines of influence informing such groups as Greenpeace and Earth First! Had he spent more time on gay, lesbian, and feminist resistance to church laws, he might have given additional resonance to his argument about the anti-establishmentarian roots of civil disobedience. Pagan opponents of nuclear energy made colorful ritual a more central part of the tradition, while Ruckus Society trainers questioned the practice of accepting the consequences of one's disobedience. The undocumented “dreamers” who publicly risked deportation while demanding the right to be educated in the country where they had been raised, on the other hand, breathed new life into the heritage of affirming American ideals while resisting specific laws. Most of these movements have been well-studied by scholars who devote minimal space to historical antecedents, and Perry missed the chance to integrate that scholarship into his longer historical perspective.

Nevertheless, Perry provides ample evidence that this American tradition is as vital today as it has ever been. The Occupy movement, he notes on the next-to-last page, made it “clear how widespread knowledge had become of the philosophy and techniques of nonviolent disobedience” (313). His book promises to make knowledge of civil disobedience history equally widespread.