Portside

Historical scholarship is looking anew into the ways that slavery was intertwined with the movement that created the American Revolution. Here is one of the most recent forays into that line of inquiry.

Reluctant Reformers addresses what I think of as the tripwire of U.S. politics: race. But it does so by examining how several social movements, including abolition, women’s suffrage, populism, progressivism, labor, the socialist and communist left..

Whatever their promises, one problem with Utopias is that the creators of such communities tend to bring with them the values and habits they thought they were leaving behind. Reviewer Namakkal discusses a book about one such settlement.

Author Derecka Purnell seeks to "not only end the carceral state," writes reviewer Biakolo, "but to permanently transform the current punitive legal and justice framework of the United States."

This book is written by a professor in the School of Marxism Studies at Dalian University of Technology, Dalian, China, and it aims to explain the theory and practice of contemporary governance in that country.

Reviewer Foley discusses a new examination of the "professional managerial class." The book's publisher calls this book "an unapologetically polemical call to reject making a virtue out of taste and consumption habits."

New York Times Pulitzer writer Isabel Wilkerson was widely applauded for two books on caste, using racial discrimination analysis that flourished in 1940s academia. But does her U.S. model explain other forms of discrimination internationally?

Acclaimed novelist Whitehead offers a crime novel set in 1960s Harlem.

The book under review, written from a labor organizer's informed perspective, is seen by the book reviewer—himself a longtime labor militant-- as an essential resource for workers navigating their retirement and pension options.

This new book attempts a reassessment of Nat Turner's famous rebellion and what it is we actually know about that event.