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Front Porch Politics: The Forgotten Heyday of American Activism in the 1970s and 1980s

This book is nearly 400 pages long, took ten years to write, and is a major intervention in the historiography on post-1960s American politics. Since historians have focused on national politics in this period and largely ignored the political culture of grassroots America, Foley had to undertake research in a wide range of primary and secondary sources (across several disciplines), examining more than a dozen types of putatively disparate social movements. Only by conducting such extensive research was he able to conceptualize the critical insight: that there was a previously-overlooked ethos of political organizing linking these movements together.