Portside

I celebrate Radical Reconstruction, a brief moment of glory, no matter how blindly and halfheartedly we, as a nation, did it. Did Reconstruction end racism? No. Does that make it a failure? No again. Considering it a failure is like considering the civil rights movement a failure because it only abolished segregation and not racism.

The worldwide cultural revolution initiated by the invention of records and record players has been vast and helps define what it has meant to be both "modern" and "post-modern." In this new book, Michael Denning surveys the scope and breadth of this revolution. Noise Uprising, says reviewer Tim Barker, "offers an ambitious, if somewhat speculative map of the connections" between the dizzying array of styles and genres of modern popular, vernacular music.

The first history of the United States told from the perspective of indigenous peoples. Today in the United States, there are more than five hundred federally recognized Indigenous nations comprising nearly three million people, descendants of the fifteen million Native people who once inhabited this land. The centuries-long genocidal program of the US settler-colonial regimen has largely been omitted from history. 2015 Recipient of the American Book Award.

Ernest Lawrence was a leading member of the scientific community that invented the atom bomb. He was also a pioneer in the growth of the military industrial complex. Michael Hiltzik tells this history in his new book. Sam Kean observes in this review that "there is much to admire and much to mourn" here, as we continue to live with the complex legacy of Big Science three quarters of a century after its emergence.

The pope's contribution to the climate debate builds on the words of his predecessors...He also cites the pathbreaking work of Bartholomew, the Orthodox leader sometimes called the "green patriarch"...Still, Francis's words fall as a rock in this pond, not a pebble...He has, in effect, said that all people of good conscience need to do as he has done and give the question the priority it requires.

The Voting Rights Act (VRA), passed by Congress in July, 1965 and signed into law by President Lyndon Johnson fifty years ago this month, has had a storied history. This basic achievement of the Civil Rights Movement has also seen conservatives, including long-time anti VRA campaigner and now U.S. Chief Justice John Roberts, fight it tooth and nail. Ari Berman tells this story, in a book Michael O'Donnell calls both a "depressing" and a "galvanizing" read.

The Guardian is known for it's best of laundry lists. A recent list of the 100 best English-language novels came with a demurrer from culture columnist Rachel Cooke, saying in effect: The ladies not meant for spurning - and that just 20 books by female authors in a best-of-100 list covering a 300-year period--especially in a listing of authors of fiction--is incomplete bordering on bizarre. Cooke elaborates on what should be on, and what she says can surely be removed.

Today's conflicts in the Middle East is often played out in a language laden with stereotypes. This can also be true of how history is told and understood. Hasan Suroor offers a glimpse of history that breaks through these barriers, in a review of a new book by Seem Alavi. This book focuses on Islam and nationalism in colonial India, but it also offers a nuanced view of relations between Muslims and the West that contests received wisdom.

Perhaps in no U.S. city is the wreckage wrought by today's capitalism better seen than in Detroit, the once mighty auto metropolis now morphed into a showcase of post-industrial abandonment. New signs of rebirth and redevelopment there are fraught with contradictions, as artists and gentrifiers engage in what Dora Apel calls "ruin lust." Here, Scott McLemee reviews Apel's take on the (former?) Motor City and post-industrial tourism and aesthetics.

Since the year 2000, Chris Molanphy reminds us in his review of this history of digital music by Stephen Witt, "the recording industry’s revenue has more than halved and music consumption has undergone a definitive realignment." How did this happen? At least part of the story has to do with the story Witt tells. It's a story of how music traders, engineers, rogue industry executives, and music hobbyists all came together to create massive disruption.