Departments

;

radical history

  • SOURCE: Yes!
    1/26/2023

    Why We Need Pirates

    by Paul Buhle, Marcus Rediker and David Lester

    Though vilified in popular culture, the history of piracy shows that many crews were egalitarian bands of maritime workers escaping their exploitation at the hands of merchant companies and navies. A new graphic adaptation of a recent history of piracy tells the story. 

  • 1/15/2023

    Revisiting Kropotkin 180 Years After His Birth

    by Sam Ben-Meir

    The rise of automation and the concurrent squeeze of workers in the name of profit offer an opportunity to revisit the ideas of Russian anarchist Pyotr Kropotkin as a forward-looking critique of power. 

  • SOURCE: LitHub
    1/5/2023

    No Socialism in America?

    by Michael Kazin

    Utopian socialist Robert Owen's heralded visit to Congress in 1825 shows that doubts about the relationship of liberty and economic inequality, and the proposal of socialism as an alternative, have been part of the American political scene from the beginning. 

  • SOURCE: Labor and Working Class History Association
    11/19/2022

    Staughton Lynd, 1929-2022

    by Rosemary Feurer

    Lynd was an academic and activist when those combinations were reviled as unbecoming of a professional, and he was blacklisted from the profession for his bold anti-war stance. He then made an impact as an activist for labor and against war. 

  • 12/4/2022

    Farewell, Brother Staughton

    by Carl Mirra

    Staughton Lynd was always in the trenches fighting for a better world, and for that he remains a “admirable radical” and, for that matter, a beautiful person.

  • SOURCE: N + 1
    11/11/2022

    Mike Davis Forced Readers to Embrace Specificity

    by Gabriel Winant

    The recently deceased radical scholar never allowed the particularity of historical moments to disappear under theoretical abstraction, which made his work powerful and compelling. 

  • SOURCE: The New Yorker
    10/26/2022

    Mike Davis Could See the Future

    by Hua Hsu

    Often wrongly called a "prophet of doom," Mike Davis worked to show how digging up the past could point the way to a humane future. 

  • SOURCE: The Nation
    10/25/2022

    Mike Davis, 1946-2022

    by Jon Wiener

    "Mike hated being called “a prophet of doom.” Yes, LA did explode two years after City of Quartz; the fires and floods did get more intense after Ecology of Fear, and of course a global pandemic did follow The Monster at Our Door."

  • SOURCE: New Books Network
    10/24/2022

    Ahmed White: How Capital Crushed the IWW

    Ahmed White's book on the IWW examines the effort to crush the radical union, and how the war on radical labor impacted free speech, political representation, and freedom of association. 

  • SOURCE: The Atlantic
    10/20/2022

    A Lesson in Humility and Justice

    by Imani Pery

    Margaret Burnham's study of lynching and of the legal sanction given to racist violence stands in a long tradition of African American intellectuals who have recognized the need to study society in order to change it.