radical history

• 
• SOURCE: NPR
  5/1/2022
  

  We Overlooked May Day This Year – We Aren't Alone in the US

  Historian Peter Linebaugh explains that the international day of labor solidarity has always sat uneasily with American nationalism. 

• 
• SOURCE: Boston Review
  4/21/2022
  

  For Black Detroiters, the City's History of Mutual Aid is as Relevant as Ever

  by Nate File

  "The mutual aid movement here is steeped in history and working to build the city that politicians and private actors have promised for decades but failed to deliver."

• 
• SOURCE: Boston Review
  4/19/2022
  

  T. Thomas Fortune: The Forgotten Founder of Abolition Democracy

  by Robin D.G. Kelley

  T. Thomas Fortune's critique of Reconstruction is a radical intellectual document that has valuable lessons for the activists and scholars associated with the prison abolition movement. 

• 
• SOURCE: Labor and Working Class History Association
  4/4/2022
  

  With Amazon Union, What's Old is New Again

  by Rosemary Feurer

  The victory of the Amazon Labor Union in Staten Island doesn't represent a revival of "the 1930s insurgency," but a new generation finding guidance from some of the bottom-up solidarity building strategies from that decade. Today's unionism will have to avoid some mistakes of the CIO to endure.

• 
• SOURCE: The Atlantic
  4/4/2022
  

  2022's Labor Uprising Reminds of More Radical Past and Possible Future

  by Xochitl Gonzalez

  The Puerto Rican Revolutionary Workers' Organization encouraged its college-educated members to take on industrial work to support a labor union movement in crisis; the moment encouraged a broader sense of who is a worker. Today, are workers in health, service, and logistics coming to a similar recognition? 

• 
• SOURCE: Black Perspectives
  4/4/2022
  

  The Radical MLK and a Usable Past

  by Robert Greene II

  "Above all, King’s “usable past” was part of a long tradition of Black Americans claiming a place for themselves in the larger tapestry of American history and memory."

• 
• SOURCE: Made By History at the Washington Post
  3/8/2022
  

  Restore the Radical Origins of International Womens Day

  by Tiana U. Wilson

  International Women's Day didn't always center on tech executives issuing platitudes from Dubai. The needs of women today require recovering the day's roots in international labor and anticolonial movements. 

• 
• SOURCE: The Nation
  3/4/2022
  

  Is there Any Place for Patriotism on the Left? Michael Kazin and Rafia Zakaria Debate

  Does patriotism help people on the left engage with the democratic process, ensuring it isn't dominated by the right? Or does it stop people from developing the international consciousness needed to address the world's problems? 

• 
• SOURCE: New Left Review
  3/7/2022
  

  Thanatos Triumphant

  by Mike Davis

  Russian's invasion of Ukraine has revealed the nihilism of the world's leaders from Moscow to Washington, and the failure of the American left to develop a meaningful alternative to a global death-wish led by oligarchs.

• 
• SOURCE: The New Republic
  2/7/2022
  

  Todd Gitlin's Work Against the Dark

  by Jeffrey C. Isaac

  As an activist and later a chronicler of Students for a Democratic Society, Todd Gitlin shaped the path and the legacy of the New Left. 

• 
• SOURCE: New York Review of Books
  12/16/2021
  

  Review: Digging For Utopia

  by Kwame Anthony Appiah

  "There was a stepwise connection, we think, between sowing cereals in our primeval past and waiting in line at the Department of Motor Vehicles." Do David Graeber and David Wengrow effectively demolish this assumption in a new book with implications for how we understand freedom and civilization? 

• 
• SOURCE: Boston Review
  11/16/2021
  

  SNCC's Unruly Internationalism

  by Dan Berger

  SNCC activists' global understanding of the problem of racism, expressed at the height of the Cold War, cost the organization external support, but left a vital legacy for international movements for justice. 

• 
• SOURCE: Boston Review
  11/4/2021
  

  Radical Movements and Political Power: Terence Renaud on New Lefts

  by Justin H. Vassallo

  Terence Renaud's history places the international New Left movements that emerged in the 1960s, and today's left activism, in the context of radical traditions that have sought to avoid hierarchy and rigidity. Questions remain about how ideals and ethics can combine with organizing to change institutions.

• 
• SOURCE: Public Books
  10/6/2021
  

  "No There There": Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor on the Future of the Left

  "I’m sitting in the car, barreling down the highway, asking myself, 'What happened in my life that has put me in this position where I have to like listen to this &%$*@ nonsense?' I needed to leave. But like most people, I needed the health insurance."

• 
• SOURCE: New York Times
  10/12/2021
  

  When the Young Lords Took Over a Hospital and Changed Public Health Care

  by Emma Francis-Snyder

  "The dramatic takeover of Lincoln Hospital produced one of the first Patient’s Bill of Rights, changing patients’ relationship with hospitals and doctors nationwide."

• 
• SOURCE: Public Books
  10/5/2021
  

  Freedom Education: Dialogues Between Top Scholars and Grad Students

  by Nathan D.B. Connolly and Stuart Schrader

  Nathan D.B. Connolly and Stuart Schrader introduce a series of interviews examining the connections of scholarship and organizing for justice. 

• 
• 10/3/2021
  

  The Forgotten History of Solidarity Between Black and Indigenous Freedom Movements

  by Kyle T. Mays

  "We have forgotten a similar time in history when African American and Native American activists battled against colonialism and white supremacy, respecting the uniqueness of both groups’ history, but understanding that an end to US empire would require solidarity."

• 
• SOURCE: New York Times
  9/24/2021
  

  Charles Sellers, 98, Historian Who Upset the Postwar Consensus, Dies

  Charles Sellers was an influential figure in explaining how the rise of market capitalism disrupted all aspects of American life, and argued this change was not for the better. 

• 
• SOURCE: The Nation
  9/20/2021
  

  Beyond the State: An Anarchist History of Humanity

  by Daniel Immerwahr

  The late radical anthropologist David Graeber, with his posthumous collaborator David Wengrow, looks to the long sweep of history to assess the prospect of human self-governance without a powerful state. 

• 
• SOURCE: The New Republic
  7/30/2021
  

  The Revolution that Wasn't: What did 1960s Radicals Achieve?

  by Michael Kazin

  A new book of narrative history of the 1960s New Left repeats a common error: mistaking rhetoric for revolution and ignoring a key outcome of the decade: that the right emerged more powerful, argues reviewer Michael Kazin.