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5 Vital Lessons from American Labor's Rise and Fall

James M. Larkin The Nation
America's unions have been in retreat for decades - but can history point toward some fresh starts? Steve Fraser's book The Age of Acquiescence reminds us that America's worker movement-100 years ago-was a rather militant creature compared to today. Then, it was worker militias, "bread and roses," and unabashed class conflict; now, it's defense and dwindling membership, and disappointing Democrats. How did we get here? Is there still power in a union?

Meet Rhiannon Giddens, A Singer Revitalizing Old-Time's Black Roots

Charlie Shelton & Frank Stasio WUNC 91.5 - North Carolina Public Radio
Meet Greensboro, North Carolina native Rhiannon Giddens; see and hear why she has taken the music world by storm. Hear her music, and that of the Carolina Chocolate Drops. See why she is stretching the borders of traditional folk music, blues, country and old-time music. Hear her tribute to the Charleston Nine.

Young Activists Getting Results--In Chicago, Across the Nation

Lolly Bowean and Dahleen Glanton Chicago Tribune
From Ferguson, Mo., where the "Black Lives Matters" movement took off, to the South Side of Chicago, where Fearless Leading by the Youth launched the trauma center campaign, young people are leading the call for justice. And increasingly across the country, they are strategically amplifying their message to get results.

The Next to Die: Watching Death Row

Gabriel Dance The Marshall Project
The Next to Die aims to bring attention, and thus accountability, to these upcoming executions. As impartial news organizations, The Marshall Project and its journalistic partners do not take a stance on the morality of capital punishment, but we do see a need for better reporting on a punishment that so divides Americans.

What Does a Book Have to Do With a Movement?

Victoria Law Waging Nonviolence
Todd Ashker is one of the leaders of the Pelican Bay hunger strikers and the lead plaintiff in the class-action lawsuit Ashker v. Governor of California. Sometime between 2008 and 2009, Ashker managed to get his hands on “Nothing But an Unfinished Song: Bobby Sands, the Irish Hunger Striker Who Inspired a Generation." What does a book have to do with the movement that ended indefinite solitary confinement in California?

Where Is Our Jeremy Corbyn?

Chris Hedges Truthdig
Corbyn, like Syriza in Greece and Podemos in Spain, is part of the new popular resistance that is rising up from the ruins of neoliberalism and globalization to fight the international banking system and American imperialism. We have yet to mount this battle effectively in the United States. We too must work to build a socialist nation.

John Lewis: How We Won, and Are Losing, the Right to Vote

John Lewis The Washington Post
John Lewis  is a congressman from Georgia. He was the chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, was a leader of the Selma-to-Montgomery march for voting rights in 1965 and is the last surviving speaker from the historic March on Washington. This is his review of the new book, Give Us the Ballot, The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America By Ari Berman; Farrar Straus and Giroux. 372 pp. $28