Slonecker, Blake, 1981-

An historian of twentieth century social movements, Blake Slonecker received his doctorate at the University of North Carolina in 2009 and joined the history faculty at Waldorf College soon thereafter. In a dissertation examining the utopian impulses of the New Left, Slonecker explored how the political and cultural activism of the 1960s helped reshape American political culture in the decade following. The center of his narrative was the Liberation News Service, a press agency for the counterculture, as well as a series of associated communes in western Massachusetts and Vermont which Slonecker argues were structured as a "family" on a Thoreauvian ideal of "sincerity, accountability, and equality." His work on the New Left and the American counterculture has appeared regularly in historical journals, with his first book, A new dawn for the New Left: Liberation News Service, Montague Farm, and the long sixties, appearing in 2012.

Slonecker has received recognition on several occasions for his outstanding teaching at Waldorf, and he continues to research the intersection of late twentieth-century social movements, including civil rights, student movements, gay and women's liberation, and pacifism.

From the guide to the Blake Slonecker Oral History Collection MS 795., 2008, (Special Collections and University Archives, University of Massachusetts Amherst Libraries)