radical history

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• 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. 

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• 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. 

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• 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. 

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• 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.

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• 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. 

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• SOURCE: Post45
  8/8/2022
  

  Noir Politics in Mike Davis's "City of Quartz"

  by Charlotte Rosen

  The late Mike Davis wrote his influential and controversial history of Los Angeles as a noir thriller, exposing the greed and corruption beneath the sunny surface. 

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• SOURCE: Boston Review
  8/1/2022
  

  "Freedom Dreams" at 20: Robin D.G. Kelley on the Ongoing Work of Imagining Liberation

  by Robin D.G. Kelley

  "The “Black Spring” rebellion of 2020 sparked a renewed interest in Freedom Dreams. But the book was never intended as a roadmap.... Instead, it humbly offered a different take on histories of a handful of social movements by centering their visions of a better future for all."

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• SOURCE: Made By History at the Washington Post
  5/17/2022
  

  The Abortion Rights Movement Needs Something More than Voting

  by Spencer Beswick

  Anarchists and other more radical reproductive justice activists have pioneered direct action and mutual aid methods that will be needed to make sure women can access abortion after Roe. 

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• 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. 

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• 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."

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• 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. 

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• 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? 

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• 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."

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• 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. 

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• 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? 

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• 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?