Detroit Women for Peace activist Alice Herz remains a relatively unknown figure among both the public and historians, a status that belies her significant place in the history of peace activism.

A collection of primary sources related tot he peace and Anti-Vietnam War movement.

He did it one rush-hour evening, in gathering dark, 40 feet below the window of the secretary of defense. The flame shot 12 feet in the air, making an envelope of color around his incinerating body. The sound of it, they said, was like the whoosh of small rocket fire.

The Vietnam antiwar movement was the first mass movement against a war in American history and one of its great moral crusades, yet most Americans recall only enormous protests and social chaos. In fact, the 10-year movement was a complex phenomenon that evolved strategically as circumstances changed. It can be broken down into four overlapping stages.

His refusal to be drafted to fight in the war transcended the boxing ring, which he had dominated, at great personal cost.

The movement against U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War began small–among peace activists and leftist intellectuals on college campuses–but gained national prominence in 1965, after the United States began bombing North Vietnam in earnest.

David Miller was not the first person to destroy a draft card but after publicly burning his on Oct. 15, 1965, he became the first person to be prosecuted under that law and a symbol of the growing movement against the war.

At the Catholic Worker’s residential Maryhouse last Friday night, three grizzled anti-war activists marked the 50th anniversary of burning their draft cards on Nov. 6, 1965, in opposition to the Vietnam War with two other pacifist comrades in Union Square.

On June 23, 1967, President Lyndon Johnson arrived at Century City to deliver a speech at a Democratic Party fundraiser. Ten thousand anti-Vietnam War protesters also arrived.

Fifty years ago, tens of thousands of people gathered in Washington to protest the Vietnam War. Here are some of their stories.

As the U.S. became increasingly militarized in Vietnam, a select group of University of Michigan professors formed the Faculty Committee to Stop the War in Vietnam. Their goal was to organize a “work moratorium,” or a strike, in opposition of the ‘moral, political, and military consequences’ of the war and to get their colleagues as well as students involved.

On April 17, the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), a civil rights activist group, led the first of several anti-war marches in Washington, D.C., with about 25,000 protesters.

On October 15, 1965, the first large scale act of civil disobedience in opposition to the Vietnam War occurred when approximately 40 people staged a sit-in at the Ann Arbor, Michigan draft board. They were sentenced to 10 to 15 days in jail.

Three army privates, known as the "Fort Hood Three", refused to deploy in Vietnam, calling the war "illegal and immoral", and were sentenced to prison terms.

The marchers who converged on the Pentagon 50 years ago placed flowers in soldiers’ guns but also opened up a cultural faultline that persists to this day

In 1969, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of public school students in Iowa who had worn black armbands to school to protest the Vietnam War. That decision still resonates today.

Everybody knew it would be interesting, the trial of eight people charged with conspiring to incite the riots that erupted during the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago.

Defense Secretary Robert McNamara sent a top-secret memorandum to President Lyndon B. Johnson expressing his disillusionment with the war effort in Vietnam. The document came to light with the publication of the Pentagon Papers by several newspapers in 1971.

A look back on Eugene McCarthy, the Democratic senator from Minnesota whose presidential candidacy was based on opposition to the war in Vietnam and who helped bring down a president.

In early April 1967, an influential voice was raised for the first time in opposition to the Vietnam War: Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

Speech given by the President of SDS Carl Oglesby at the November 27th 1965 March on Washington.

In February 1968, US senator and presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy delivered a speech in Chicago, declaring that the war in Vietnam could not be won militarily.

One of the least known but most important chapters in the history of the Vietnam antiwar movement was the rebellion of troops within the military.

Carole Barbato, a communication studies professor at Kent State University who was a junior there in 1970, speaks about her personal and historic knowledge about the famous images, sharing her insight and observations about the killings 43 years later.

Alan Canfora shares his story of being shot at the Vietnam War Protest at Kent State University on May 4, 1970. Moments after waving the black flag, Canfora was shot in the wrist by the National Guard. Then, he saw his roommate and best friend shot in the leg. Later, he saw the dead.