Scholars and journalists alike often truncate the roots of social movements by pointing to simple origin stories, predicated on the publication of seminal books like Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, Michael Harrington’s The Other America, or Ralph Nader’s Unsafe at Any Speed. The truth is that books and intellectualism have a role, but it’s more often symbolic and a function of collective memory than collective action. For a fuller story, these authors believe we must consider social and historical factors outside the world of big, singular ideas (or big, singular expressions of those ideas).