This Week in People’s History, May 14–20, 2025

A campaign button for the May 14, 2000, Million Mom March
Gun Control? What’s That? (2000), Many Bullets, No Justice (1970), Famous But Unknown (1950), What’s In a Name? A Lot (1990), Riot or Rebellion in Miami? (1980), Lay Down that Sword and Shield (1960), Strong-Arm Tactics Aren’t Pretty, But . . (1960)

Mahmoud Khalil’s Letter from Jail to His Son

To my newborn son: I am absent not out of apathy, but conviction. Deen, the grief I feel being apart from you is one drop in a sea of sorrow Palestinian families have drowned in for generations

The ‘Disappeared’: Lessons From Latin America

We can’t help but connect what is happening in our country today to a long history in the Americas of governments’ use of enforced disappearance. Three experts with direct experience provide lessons in how to protest, to mobilize, to fight back.

John Berger’s Essays on Language Still Resonate

That chasm between language and reality, “the ravine between declared principles and real aims,” obscured both the atrocities of the war and the real motivations for the invasion.

Tolkien Against the Grain

The Lord of the Rings is a book obsessed with ruins, bloodlines, and the divine right of aristocrats. Why are so many on the left able to love it?

Political Attacks Could Crush the mRNA Vaccine

Drug makers are scrambling to navigate an ‘existential threat’ to a once-celebrated technology.

A Fighting Union’s Path to Renewal: The UE Story

The ongoing organizational renewal and substantial growth of UE is one of the most remarkable stories in the U.S. labor movement in decades. Of the 42 unions who comprised the founding roster of the CIO in 1938 only eight survive intact today.

How Unions Can Protect Immigrants

An interview with Faye Guenther, president of UFCW Local 3000.

They Had List-ICE Arrests Workers in Labor Rights Case

“We are concerned at the appearance of targeting publicly pro-union worker leaders,” said a union official about a raid in western New York.

Inside the Bloodbath at the NIH

Sources say that a climate of fear has spread throughout the agency as the Trump administration takes a hatchet to its core functions.
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Popular

US Defeat in Vietnam

The US invasion of Vietnam was a catastrophe for the Vietnamese people, resulting in millions of deaths. Fifty years ago today, the US-backed regime finally collapsed as North Vietnamese forces took control of Saigon.

Culture

poetry

Day 570

Anita Barrows
California poet Anita Barrows writes: "When the genocide began I started writing daily notes. I felt the urgency to document these tragedies in a whole poem every day, and that is what I will do until the genocide ends. I intend to keep writing."

books

This Is More Than a Legal Read

Bill Fletcher, Jr. Portside
The focus of the book is on Dominic Ongwen, a former soldier in the cultish army known as the Lord’s Resistance Army in northern Uganda. Ongwen had been kidnapped by the LRA when he was nine years old and transformed into a soldier and criminal...

books

Dangerous Chimera

Colin Kidd London Review of Books
Reviewer Kidd considers a new history of the idea of liberty by one of the UK's most esteemed political philosophers.

Labor

labor

UFCW President Stepping Down, Successor To Be Appointed This Week

Lisa Xu Labor Notes
United Food and Commercial Workers President Mark Perrone is expected to announce his retirement this week. The reform organization Essential Workers for Democracy (EW4D) is pushing for a transparent and democratic process to choose a successor.

labor

Democrats Learned To Love Class Dealignment

Neal Meyer Jacobin
The neoliberal economic program embraced by the Clinton-era Democratic Party alienated many working-class voters. Democrats responded by reorienting their electoral strategy toward professional-class voters, accelerating workers’ departure

labor

‘DOGE Already Happened in Chicago’

Michaela Brant The Progressive
The president of the Chicago Teachers Union spoke to The Progressive about the union’s new contract that will protect Chicago educators and students from the threats of the Trump Administration.

labor

America’s Labor Unions Are Souring on Trump

Steven Greenhouse The Guardian
A new AFL-CIO poll found that a majority of union members say the country is moving in the wrong direction, with many complaining that Trump has done nothing to reduce inflation.

labor

Labor Goes All In for Abrego Garcia

Adrian Carrasquillo The Bulwark
AFL-CIO President Liz Schuler condemned President Donald Trump's deportation of Kilmar Abrego Garcia and described the unlawful overreach as an attack on all workers.

Friday nite video

video

How to Prevent Future Trumps

If America doesn't respond to the calamity that's befallen the working class, we will have Trumps as far as the eye can see