Portside

Every year, Portside asks our readers for their help and support. This, however, is not like other years. What months ago was a scary thought is now our, and the world's reality - a Trump presidency. We need to work together, to build, to organize, and to understand what works, and what doesn't. Portside provides reportage, inspiration, investigation and analysis that are needed more than ever. We promise to do our part. Will you help?

A look at the English Revolution's first decade, where radicals forced parliamentary leaders to complete the revolt against the monarchy, creating a some two decades-long republic through a genuine social revolution. The book's author is credited with bringing an activist's perspective to it and situating the uprising and the corresponding invention of the pamphlet as the basis for English popular sovereignty, despite the Glorious Revolution's return to a monarchy later.

Rock and roll music has always been a site of struggle over issues of race and racism. In this insightful review, Colin Vanderburg surveys what Jack Hamilton has o say regarding how rock music succumbed to the lure of American racism.

Julie Dash's Sundance indie, 'Daughters of the Dust', about an African family finally gets the theatrical release it deserves 25 years later – and it couldn't be more timely

Why are we championing diversity and inclusivity when it comes to race and gender, but not class? Class, which we all know by now is just as much a defining factor in a person’s life as race or gender (if not moreso).

Forty years working as a machinist, poet Fred Voss zeroes in on the quiet danger of repetitive work and how comradeship and imagination transcend the boredom and the threat.

McLemee looks at 30 academic studies of Hillary Clinton, finding interest in her focusing either as a user of some form of communication media or as an object of media representation. Like the campaign's news coverage, where personality trumped policy, research tended to focus on how Clinton challenged or was constrained by traditional female roles or implicit assumptions about the proper connect between public and private identity than in her work as a public official.

This book, says reviewer Cass Sunstein, "might well be the best book ever written on the founders and their handiwork." It is the kind of book that helps provide useful context for this complex political moment. Readers interested in this topic might also look at America's Constitution: A Biography, by Akhil Reed Amar (Random House, 2005).

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The vegetable photographs of Charles Jones are remarkable, being ahead of their time in still life photography, and presenting a very modern view with the careful framing and studio portraits.