Waging a Good War
by Thomas E. Ricks · first published 2022
5mentions
4recommended by
5HN commenters
2025–2026first – last mentioned
80% recommend20% neutral
In Waging a Good War, the bestselling author Thomas E. Ricks offers a fresh perspective on America’s greatest moral revolution—the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s—and its legacy today. While the Movement has become synonymous with Martin Luther King, Jr.’s ethos of nonviolence, Ricks, a Pulitzer Prize–winning war reporter, draws on his deep knowledge of tactics and strategy to advance a surprising but revelatory idea: the greatest victories for Black Americans of the past century were won not by idealism alone, but by paying attention to recruiting, training, discipline, and organ
Affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.
The book Brett uses as his main source, Waging A Good War, is an incredible book that I strongly recommend. It treats the Civil Rights movement as a military campaign and analyzes it from the perspective of a military historian. Not in the sense that it was…
on “Iran students stage first large anti-government protests since deadly crackdown” ↗Tomas Rick's Waging a Good War: A Military History of the Civil Rights Movement 1954-68 should be required reading at this point https://www.amazon.com/Waging-Good-War-Military-1954-1968/dp... Ricks kinda beats a dead horse as he…
on “The AI Backlash Could Get Ugly” ↗Waging a Good War: A Military History of the Civil Rights Movement, 1954-1968 was really good. It looked at the history of the civil rights movement from the perspective of a military historian, analyzing each step as…
on “Ask HN: What's the best book you read in the last year?” ↗I am a resident of the Twin Cities and I agree wholeheartedly with this perspective. I found reading the book Waging A Good War very educational about the deliberate, strategic use of nonviolence by the American Civil Rights Movement and its ultimate triumph as a means to win support and achieve social change. It was a clear and…
on “Sam Altman's home targeted in second attack” ↗…can provide training, logistical support, and at least some degree of legal support. The first two are if anything even more important given that these situations tend to be chaotic and tense. The book Waging a Good War documents the intensive training that activists underwent during the civil rights movement which was crucial for their success. Of course the situation is much more lawless now in places like Minneapolis…
on “Letter from a Birmingham Jail [King, Jr.] (1963)” ↗