Portside

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.

It was when philanthropist Julius Rosenwald read Booker T. Washington's 'Up From Slavery' and then met the celebrated black educator on the campus of Tuskegee Institute that his life work came into focus. Rosenwald became passionate about providing funding for more than 5,300 schools in the Jim Crow South. At one point in the pre-civil rights era, it was estimated, one in three black youths in the South attended a Rosenwald school.

Mullins asked for their latest comments on current proposals to preserve the area, focusing on the 1,600-acre Blair Mountain Battlefield National Register of Historic Places Nomination Area, or the BMBNA. The companies interested in mining the area include: Aracoma Coal Co., a subsidiary of Alpha Natural Resources; Mingo Logan Coal, a subsidiary of Arch Coal; and WPP LLC, a coal-leasing company with offices in Delaware.

Menus of Change conference discusses sustainability, ecology, water sourcing, the benefits of “plant-forward” diet, and food culture.

Last week the NLRB issued a major ruling that corporations can be considered "joint employers" of workers hired by franchisees or subcontractors. There has been relatively little attention to the ruling in many places, but the business press is paying close attention. Here is a piece from the International Business Times, trying to make sense of the ruling.

Led by executive producer and director José Padilha (2014's RoboCop), the series tracks the rise and fall of "King of Cocaine" Pablo Escobar, and the bloody drug war between the American Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) and Colombia’s notorious Medellín Cartel. A well-crafted blend of The Wire and Goodfellas, Narcos takes an unflinching look at one of the War on Drugs’ single most violent conflicts.

The language of social justice has been used to sell intensified neoliberalism in post-Katrina New Orleans. On the tenth anniversary of the failure of the federally maintained levees, the keynote speaker at the annual Rising Tide Conference on the Future of New Orleans was DeRay Mckesson, a standard-bearer for Teach For America and the New Teacher Project — education “reform” organizations that played a crucial role in the destruction of the black middle class.

The resolution also endorses the worldwide BDS movement – Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions – to pressure Israel to end its apartheid over the Palestinians just as similar tactics helped to end South African apartheid in the 1980s. UE is now the first U.S. national union to endorse BDS.

Good article