Skip to main content

This Week in People’s History, May 21–27, 2025

Act Up demonstrators on the National Institutes of Health campus in May 1990
Act Up Against Bad Science (1990), Don’t Talk, Take Action! (1980), Racism Debunked, But for How Long? (1950), Speak Up, Memory! (2025), Protest and Serve (2020), National Institute of Health, R.I.P? (1930), Really Making Peru Great Again (1975)

How Democrats Beat a Supposedly Unbeatable Republican

The supposedly unbeatable Republican mayor of Nebraska’s largest city used the GOP’s anti-LGBTQ+ playbook in her reelection bid. And suffered a resounding loss!

Heritage Plan To Crush the Pro-Palestinian Movement

Even before President Trump was re-elected, the Heritage Foundation, best known for Project 2025, set out to destroy pro-Palestinian activism in the United States.

Fight for the Citizenship Rights of U.S. Prisoners

Trump's Plan to Render U.S. Citizens to Foreign Jails Seeks to Exploit Americans' Disinterest in the Rights of Prisoners.

Illinois' Unlawful Tax Foreclosures

The Supreme Court ruled unconstitutional a decades-old practice of taking every cent of people’s home equity over unpaid property taxes. Experts say Illinois lags behind other states with a segregation-era law that mostly affects Black communities.

Sunday Science: On Being Wrong

Is Neil deGrasse Tyson ever wrong? Neil and Chuck Nice break down all the ways he can be wrong, big moments when scientists were wrong from history, and why science itself is never wrong.

America’s Great Brain Drain

America’s shores are experiencing a huge sucking sound as one of the biggest brain drains of modern history hits the country’s best, smartest, heading for Europe on grants, as smiles abound across the pond.

One Brief Shining Moment

Manisha Sinha’s history of Reconstruction sheds fresh light on the period that fleetingly opened a door to a different America.

Pope Leo XIV’s Link to Haiti

It is this – and so much more – that makes theirs a truly American story.

The Fog of War

Fifty years after the Vietnam War, researchers are still struggling to document the long-term health effects of the massive spraying of Agent Orange and other herbicides
Read more

Culture

poetry

Poem

Muriel Rukeyser The Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser
Writing in 1968, poet and activist Muriel Rukeyser addresses the struggle to imagine and build a more humane world.

books

Mr. Lonely

Zoë Hu Dissent Magazine
Some have suggested that young men are drawn to Andrew Tate because they suffer from a dearth of social contact. Yet men go to Tate not to alleviate loneliness but to intensify it.

Labor

labor

Starbucks Dress Code Causes Walkouts

Grace Snelling Fast Company
The union has been bargaining to reach a contract with Starbucks for over three years, with no end in sight. It says that the new dress code represents “bad faith bargaining,” .

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.

Friday nite video

video

Trump's Epic 'Weave'

Concluding his Mideast corruption tour in the United Arab Emirates, Trump engages in a 15 minute ramble about Sean Duffy and Pete Buttigieg’s bicycle