We live in interesting times although most mainstream media interest – horrified as it appears to be at world events – tends towards elites as saviours, understating the political-historic significance of mass protest and resistance. Yet, the world, and particularly the United States, is experiencing not only an age of authoritarianism but also an era of unprecedented mass movements against authoritarianism and oppression. An iron law of democracy is at work against the iron law and grip of oligarchy.In the US, there are increasingly strident calls for a nationwide general strike – unprecedented in the country’s history, despite its glorious traditions of strikes, revolts and rebellions. Harvard’s Crowd Counting Consortium notes that the US is currently experiencing its most intensive and extensive historical period of mass protest.Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty.As this review is being written, masses of people across the US are marching against the Trump administration’s draconian and violent ICE operations, including the recent killing of Renee Good in Minneapolis. The US was not made by lawyers and entrepreneurs alone, as conventional great man histories teach, but by millions of marchers, strikers, rioters, pacifists and conscientious objectors, petition-signers, letter writers. In this context, Gloria J. Browne-Marshall’s A Protest History of the United States offers a sweeping chronicle of resistance spanning over 400 years, from Indigenous defiance against European colonisation to contemporary climate activism, Black Lives Matter uprisings and environmental protests. The author celebrates protest as an “unbroken thread” woven into the fabric of American history, primal and essential to democratic progress, empowering marginalised voices and pushing the nation toward its professed ideals of equality and justice. From Chief Powhatan’s armed resistance against English settlers at Jamestown to the global echoes of George Floyd’s murder, Browne-Marshall frames these acts as foundational, reminding readers that dissent has been the engine of change.In a very personal and moving author’s note, Browne-Marshall hails activists as “soldiers for justice” who should be recognised for their sacrifice and service , yet who are often poor and alone at the end of their lives, unlike those elites recognised and rewarded for ‘public service’ while spending their lives fleecing the people. She urges people to “use [their] power within [their] sphere of influence to start a ripple effect that brings social change…” “In art or academia,” she exhorts, take a knee or walk a picket line…” because protest can be the act of doing one small thing…”‘Use your power’ – a direct challenge to elite-produced ‘hopelessness’. As David Graeber argues, there is a “vast bureaucratic apparatus for the creation and maintenance of hopelessness, a kind of giant machine that is designed… to destroy any sense of possible alternative futures.” Structured across eight chapters, Browne-Marshall’s book draws on legal documents, memoirs, archival sources, government records, interviews and personal narratives to broaden the definition of protest. She includes not only marches and strikes but also boycotts, legal challenges, litigation, everyday acts of cultural preservation, speaking out and extreme self-sacrifice, such as LGBTQ+ rights lawyer David Buckel’s 2018 self-immolation in protest against fossil fuel dependence and climate inaction. There’s no question that the book is both catalogue and inspiration to stand up and be counted and to make history. But the book has its limitations too, which in no way detract from its central hopeful message.A Gramscian critique and appreciationFrom a Gramscian perspective, however, Browne-Marshall’s narrative, while profoundly inspiring and richly detailed with empirical examples, remains constrained within a liberal-reformist framework that ultimately reinforces rather than dismantles the hegemonic order it critiques. Antonio Gramsci’s concepts of hegemony, historic blocs, counter-hegemony, war of manoeuvre, and war of position offer a more radical lens: US protest history emerges not as a triumphant redemption of American exceptionalism but as a protracted subaltern struggle against the intertwined forces of capitalist accumulation, racial domination and settler-colonialism.Gramsci distinguished between the “war of manoeuvre” – direct, confrontational assaults on state power – and the “war of position,” the slower construction of counter-hegemony through ideological and cultural institutions in civil societyBrowne-Marshall vividly documents numerous wars of manoeuvre. In Chapter One, she details Indigenous resistance, spotlighting Chief Powhatan’s 1622 uprising against encroaching English colonists, a desperate armed defence of land, life, and culture that killed hundreds of settlers but ultimately failed against superior firepower and disease. Later. Indigenous protests, such as the ongoing Standing Rock resistance against pipelines, echo this pattern: explosive confrontations that disrupt but rarely overturn the coercive apparatus of the state. Chapter Two recounts slave rebellions and everyday defiance under chattel slavery – Nat Turner’s 1831 insurrection, Denmark Vesey’s planned revolt, and countless acts of sabotage or escape – that challenged the brutal coercion of the plantation system. These were raw assertions of humanity against dehumanisation, yet they were swiftly crushed, reinforcing the need for broader ideological contestation.Labor struggles in Chapter Three provide further empirical depth: Browne-Marshall highlights the Haymarket Affair of 1886, where workers demanding an eight-hour day faced violent repression, and the Pullman Strike of 1894, paralysed by federal troops. Union organizing, from the Knights of Labor to the CIO’s interracial efforts in the 1930s, forced concessions like the Fair Labor Standards Act. Anti-war protests in Chapter Four feature conscientious objectors during World War I and Muhammad Ali’s courageous 1967 refusal of the Vietnam draft – a personal stand that cost him his title but culminated in a Supreme Court victory, symbolising resistance to imperial wars abroad tied to racial oppression at home.Immigrant rebellions in Chapter Five (“Rebellions Behind Our Golden Door”), women’s suffrage in Chapter Six (“Her Body. Her Ballot.”), and protests against violent policing in Chapter Seven – from the 1992 Los Angeles uprisings after Rodney King’s beating to the 2020 George Floyd protests – illustrate persistent wars of manoeuvre. Browne-Marshall inspiringly profiles figures like Rosa Parks, whose 1955 bus refusal sparked the Montgomery Boycott, and the suffragettes’ militant tactics, including hunger strikes and White House pickets that pressured Woodrow Wilson into supporting the 19th Amendment. In Chapter Eight, environmental racism and climate denial are contested through acts like David Buckel’s tragic self-immolation, underscoring protest’s expansion to planetary survival.These examples inspire profoundly: they reveal subaltern resilience, cross-generational continuity, and the power of collective action to extract reforms – suffrage, civil rights laws, labour protections and heightened awareness of police brutality and ecological crisis. Yet, in Gramscian terms, most remain wars of manoeuvre that rarely dismantle the hegemonic apparatus. US capitalism, founded on Indigenous dispossession and racialised slavery, sustains dominance through consent manufactured in civil society: media, education, foundations, and philanthropy that naturalise inequality as “opportunity.” Concessions like the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965 integrated Black Americans into the liberal order while safeguarding corporate property and elite power. Radical voices – Malcolm X’s global anti-imperialism, the Black Panthers’ community programs and armed defence – were systematically marginalised, assassinated, or co-opted.Browne-Marshall’s focus on heroic individuals (Ali, Parks, Buckel) and thematic silos risks fragmenting class analysis. Gramsci emphasised that subaltern groups must cultivate organic intellectuals and forge alliances to build counter-hegemony. US movements often divide along racial, gender, or issue lines, facilitating elite absorption. Philanthropic foundations (Rockefeller, Ford) funded moderate organisations like the NAACP, diverting energy from anti-capitalist critiques toward legalistic reform.The author’s dualism – “United States” as oppressive reality versus “America” as idealistic promise – mirrors liberal ideology, mystifying hegemony by suggesting protest redeems the nation’s soul. Gramsci would counter that the “American Dream” itself manufactures consent, obscuring how land theft, slavery, and imperialism are not deviations but constitutive of capitalist development. Reforms often enact “passive revolution”: elites grant changes to pre-empt radical transformation.Nevertheless, Browne-Marshall’s empirical richness inadvertently illuminates counter-hegemonic sparks. Intersections emerge – 1960s labour-Civil Rights alliances, Standing Rock’s coalition of Indigenous activists with environmentalists and veterans, or BLM’s links to climate justice – hinting at wars of position. In organic crises, when ruling blocs falter in securing consent (economic inequality, police violence, climate catastrophe), openings arise for subaltern leadership.Gramscian dictum meets Browne-Marshall’s hopeful visionHere, Gramsci’s dictum – “pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will” – bridges critically to Browne-Marshall’s hopeful vision. The intellect demands sober acknowledgment of hegemony’s durability: protests force concessions but are absorbed, radicals suppressed, movements fragmented. Yet the will insists on relentless action. Browne-Marshall embodies this optimism: her expansive protest definition – survival as resistance, litigation as rebellion – empowers readers amid chaos, weaving personal family stories of perseverance into a narrative of unyielding hope. Her examples inspire because they prove subaltern agency endures, from Powhatan’s defiance to Floyd’s global echo.In this era of deepening inequality, ecological collapse, resurgent authoritarianism, and widespread cynicism amid Trumpism’s furious onslaught, Browne-Marshall’s history affirms protest’s indispensability as an inspiring call to action. Congratulations to the author on a timely, empowering work that reignites the optimism of the will precisely when it is most needed – reminding us that, paired with intellectual clarity, persistent dissent remains the path to transformative change.Inderjeet Parmar is a professor of international politics and associate dean of research in the School of Policy and Global Affairs at City, University of London and St George’s, University of London, a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences, and writes the American Imperium column at The Wire. He is an International Fellow at the ROADS Initiative think tank, Islamabad, on the board of the Miami Institute for the Social Sciences, USA, and on the advisory board of INCT-INEU, Brazil, its leading association for study of the United States. Author of several books including Foundations of the American Century, he is currently writing a book on the history, politics, and crises of the US foreign policy establishment.