Anti-war and community activist Adam Schesch was born September 9, 1942, and raised in the New York City area. He graduated from Columbia in 1964 in history and received an M.A. in tropical history from the University of Wisconsin in 1967, with a thesis entitled “The Organizing Tactics of the Vietnamese Communist Party before World War II.”
By 1965 this research interest in Southeast Asia combined with a new political awareness to lead Schesch to a prominent role in the anti-war movement at the University of Wisconsin. He served as research director of the University Committee to End the War in Vietnam and when that was taken over by the Madison-based National Coordinating Committee to End the War in Vietnam, he also became head of its research committee. Schesch also headed the Student Peace Center, served as chairman of the Madison Committee to End the War in Vietnam, was a sponsor of the 1968 Vietnam Referendum, and authored An Outline History of Vietnam.
With the decline of the National Coordinating Committee in 1967, Schesch's interest turned toward broad-based community organizing. In 1967 he helped launch the Vietnam Civic Action Research and Education Project (Vietnam C.A.R.E. Project) to organize local Wisconsin opposition to the war. Schesch was a co-founder of the Madison Research Council, which examined the city's political and economic problems. An early member of the Wisconsin Alliance, Schesch ran for mayor with its support in 1969.
More recently he has been a social studies teacher in a high school equivalency program, spent several years studying in Chile, worked with the U.W. Extension, and developed textbooks and curricula for social studies for community education.
