This second edition examines new strategies, tactics, issues, and grassroots campaigns, and revisits whether activists have learned from past mistakes.

When I wrote the original version of The Activist's Handbook in the early 1990s, activists faced a very different social landscape. Online activism and social media were still in the future, and the potential of email and the Internet to boost activist campaigns was untapped. Americans got their news solely from television, radio, and daily newspapers. Campaigns for marriage equality were off the political radar, and a powerful national immigrant rights movement did not exist. We heard little about growing inequality between the 99 percent and the 1 percent, and few imagined the election of the nation's first African American president in 2008. These and other changes in the past two decades require a completely new version of the original book. This second edition examines new strategies, tactics, issues, and grassroots campaigns, and revisits whether activists have learned from past mistakes. It allows me to describe how activists should harness social media and other new tools to achieve their goals, and how new media can be best connected to traditional organizing and old media strategies. Student activism, at a low point when the original book came out and little mentioned, has since surged and is now the subject of an entirely new chapter. I have expanded my discussion of direct action activism to include additional campaigns and groups, and I explain why greater innovation is needed in response to opposition tactics. Since the original book, activists have become far more engaged in electoral politics, and the new book enables me to discuss how new media tools have enabled activists to increase assistance to progressive campaigns nationwide.