Jailed for Peace: The History of American Draft Law Violators, 1658-1985

Since colonial times, thousands of Americans have suffered imprisonment, torture and even death rather than participate in war. Although they’ve always been a minority, draft resisters have helped to alter American foreign and military policy, define pacifist and humanistic ideals, and shape the modern peace movement.

Concise, clearly written and painstakingly researched, this book tells their fascinating stories. Perhaps most important, as a study of resistance at other times in American history, Jailed for Peace offers much insight into its significance today.

“While its copious notes and statistical apparatus attest to real scholarship in its composition, this sympathetic history of resistance to military conscription in the U.S. is no dry-as-dust academic tone. It is a concise, humane chronicle of the most familiar expression of a very old American ideal-pacifism. Kohn begins with the Quakers, who were absolutists in their opposition to war, and the nineteenth-century abolitionists, who advocated active obstruction of war efforts. His coverage of the modern era encompasses World War I, when Quaker and abolitionist tactics were wedded in opposition to the draft; World War II, when the draft resistance declined; and the postwar years, when it sprung to record levels, especially after the U.S. plunged into Vietnam. Regarding draft resistance as an impulse of civil disobedience of the same order as the colonists' revolutionary resistance to British authority, Kohn concludes with an appreciation of the movement's continued relevance in the age of nuclear holocaust."
- Brian David Mussington, Booklist

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