In this piece in The Globe and Mail,Lawrence Glickman, the Stephen and Evalyn Milman Professor in American Studies, argues that recent NRA boycotts are succeeding at an unprecedented level, utilizing a boycott for what they've always been been about: indignant consumers puncturing political influence.
"Long before the term boycott was coined in 1880, Americans employed the tactic of non-consumption and social ostracism to achieve political goals," Glickman writes. "The 'non-importation movement,' in which merchants in the American colonies refused to sell British goods, was a key feature of the runup to the American Revolution. Abolitionists in the so-called 'free-produce movement' urged their compatriots to eschew goods made by slave labour."
Devin Flores/Cornell University
Enslavers posted as many as a quarter-million newspaper ads and flyers before 1865 to locate runaway slaves. Ed Baptist is leading the public crowdsourcing project, Freedom on the Move, that has digitized tens of thousands of these advertisements in an open-source site accessible to the public.
