"Filled with surprising insights, these beautifully researched essays on a wide range of topics demonstrate the importance and the diversity of Marxist-inspired politics and ideas in American history. At a moment of resurgence for the left, they are a wonderful resource." Kimberly Phillips-Fein, New York University "A talented group of writers. Anyone interested in understanding the past and present of the left in the United States - from Eugene Debs to W. E. B. Du Bois through AOC and Bernie Sanders - should read this book!" Bhaskar Sunkara, editor, Jacobin "Full of spirited and cogent arguments, prodigiously researched, and vivaciously told, Marxism and America is tailor-made for activists and scholars of the present moment." Alan Wald, University of Michigan Marxism and America brings together a dozen scholars to reconsider the relationship of the United States to the theoretical tradition derived from Karl Marx. It aims to explain why socialism has been so difficult to establish in America as a political project even as it has exerted a notable influence in American thought. With a preface by Nelson Lichtenstein, the book offers fresh original reconsiderations, of topics ranging from the Civil War to feminist debates over sexuality and pornography, showing a measure of influence for Marxism in American intellectual life and political culture in dimensions not often perceived. The collection takes the reader from the nineteenth century, when Marx corresponded with German-American emigrés in the U.S. and wrote for American newspapers, to the millennial socialism inspired by the presidential campaigns of Bernie Sanders. Scholars in the fields of political and intellectual history, black and African-American studies, gender and sexuality, sociology, and communications will find the book's chapters of distinct interest.