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The Colonial Origins of the UChicago Police

Julian Go Rampart
Modern policing has its origin in colonial violence. The University of Chicago has long played a part in cultivating, promoting, spreading, and normalizing the tools of such state violence.

This Week in People’s History, June 13 . . .

Portside
Photo of attorney Michael Ratner denouncing torture of prisoners at Guantanamo A people's tribune's birthday. Opposing the Vietnam War in 1968. Opposing U.S. imperialism in 1898. Debs' 1918 sedition conviction. A win for abolitionists in 1833. Boycotting Jim Crow in 1953. Thousands say, 'Escalate the war on poverty!' in 1968.

Ultra Violence

Nelson Lichtenstein Dissent
Rachel Maddow’s podcast tells the story of American Nazis in the 1940s. But the era’s real and lasting authoritarian danger came from the spectacular growth of a national security state.

One Big Union

Michael Kazin The Nation
The Red Scare and the fall of the IWW. A new history examines the lost promise and fierce persecution of the IWW.

This Week in People’s History, May 16 . . .

Portside
Member of Congress using a whip to drive Lady Liberty out of the U.S. Capitol President Wilson unleashes repression of peace advocates. Republican Party denounces slave trade as a ‘crime against humanity.’ First compulsory public education. Camden draft protestors acquitted. Wiretapping gets the nod. Amnesty for Confederates.

The Red Scare Took Aim at Black Radicals Like Langston Hughes

Peter Dreier Jacobin
Poet Langston Hughes was invited to speak at Occidental College on this day in 1948, then uninvited when red-baiters released a report calling him a “subversive.” His story shows how the postwar Red Scare targeted radicals, particularly black leftists.

A Regional Reign of Terror

Eric Foner The New York Review
Most Americans now grasp that violence was essential to the functioning of slavery, but a new book excavates the lesser known brutality of everyday Black life in the Jim Crow South.

The Great Slave Strike That Helped End Slavery

Mark A. Lause Jacobin
Today, on Presidents’ Day, we rightly celebrate Abraham Lincoln for helping end slavery. But we shouldn’t forget the unstoppable force that also brought down the Slave Power: the several million slaves who left the plantation, many of whom joined the Union Army.
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