radical history

• 
• 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. 

• 
• SOURCE: Facing South
  11/15/2022
  

  From the Archives: Bob Maurer on Charles Sherrod and New Communities Farm

  Nearly 50 years ago, activist Robert Maurer reported on the successes and challenges of a Georgia agricultural cooperative conceived as a step toward securing Black economic empowerment in the post-civil rights South. 

• 
• 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: Los Angeles Review of Books
  10/26/2022
  

  California Historians and Writers Remember Mike Davis

  Matt Garcia, William Deverell and others share personal reflections on their personal and professional intersections with the mold-breaking historian and activist. 

• 
• SOURCE: Boston Review
  10/26/2022
  

  "Treason to Whiteness is Loyalty to Humanity": A Posthumous Collection of Noel Ignatiev's Radical History

  by Mike King

  A posthumous collection of writings by the historian and labor activist reveals his practice-based thoughts on work, power, and politics, and the necessity of abolishing the idea of whiteness to create working class solidarity and power. 

• 
• 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. 

• 
• SOURCE: New York Review of Books
  10/15/2022
  

  The Crossroads: Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor on the Inadequacy of Politics as Usual

  "Today, we have lived through two terms of a Black presidency and the highest concentration of Black elected officials in Congress and beyond in American history. So the question of whether we can vote our way into liberation is no longer an abstraction."

• 
• SOURCE: The New Republic
  10/18/2022
  

  How the Government Used the First World War to Crush the American Left

  Adam Hochshild's book details the intersection of patriotism and legal repression that stifled the broad left in the United States, and explains how the war to "make the world safe for democracy" evinced an impoverished understanding of the term. 

• 
• SOURCE: Mother Jones
  10/15/2022
  

  The Nation's Most Prolific Censor – So Far

  by Adam Hochshild

  Operating out of the same building that would later house the Trump International Hotel, Postmaster General Albert Burleson used control of the mails to crush countless publishers deemed subversive. Most of his legal tools are still on the books today. 

• 
• SOURCE: Jacobin
  10/6/2022
  

  H. Chandler Davis Was a Moral Touchstone for Scholars on the Left

  by Alan Wald

  Blacklisted from American academe after defying a HUAC investigation at the University of Michigan, the mathematician (and the spouse of historian Natalie Zemon Davis) continued to teach and work as an activist in Canada until his recent death at 96. 

• 
• SOURCE: The New Yorker
  10/5/2022
  

  How the US Thwarted Radical Revolution in Mexico

  by Geraldo Cadava

  Kelly Lytle-Hernandez's new book examines the cross-border politics of the Mexican revolution and the role of elites on both sides in squelching a radical movement challenging elite rule in Mexico. 

• 
• SOURCE: New York Review of Books
  9/4/2022
  

  "Hell, Yes, We Are Subversive": The Legacy of Angela Davis

  by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor

  While Davis was acquitted of murder charges in a highly politicized case 50 years ago, her influence on contemporary protest movements has never been higher. 

• 
• SOURCE: The Guardian
  9/4/2022
  

  Ericka Huggins and Stephen Shames Team Up on Photographic History of Black Panther Women

  Looking beyond iconic and high-profile women in the movement, a new book examines the organizing energy ordinary Black women brought to, and the empowerment they often took from, the Black Panther Party.

• 
• SOURCE: Jacobin
  9/5/2022
  

  Eugene Debs: In a Just World, Every Day is Labor Day

  Read Debs's 1903 Labor Day Address in its entirety. 

• 
• SOURCE: Black Agenda Report
  8/31/2022
  

  Three Radical Black Women

  by Gerald Horne

  Esther Cooper Jackson, Louise Thompson Patterson and Dorothy Burnham should be remembered as exemplars of the struggle for comprehensive liberation in Black America, and of the role of Communists and other radicals in the long struggle for civil rights. 

• 
• SOURCE: New York Times
  8/31/2022
  

  Esther Cooper Jackson, Radical Civil Rights Activist, Dies at 105

  “She shamed you out of bourgeois confidence, then devoted selfless time to your progressive re-education,” Professor David Levering Lewis said.

• 
• SOURCE: Jacobin
  8/28/2022
  

  Recovering the Core Radicalism of the Civil Rights Movement: An Interview with Glenda Gilmore

  by Robert Greene II

  Cold war histories of civil rights have obscured the key role of communists and other radicals in establishing the economic demands of the movement and the practice of interracial mobilization.