Portside

As more and more settlers arrived in the English colonies, the property they owned north and south increasingly took the human form of African slaves, encouraging the credo that freedom for some required the enslavement of others. The books under review exhaustively cover the early slavery period, where even the Puritan ideal of a city on a hill actually rested on the backs of numerous enslaved and colonized people.

Arlie Russell Hochschild has taken readers deep into the lives and minds of contemporary conservative voters and Donald Trump supporters. As reviewer Sean McCann shows, Hochschild's new study offers welcome insight into the forces that are driving our divisive politics.

Ava DuVernay’s new documentary chronicles how our justice system has been driven by racism from the days of slavery to today’s era of mass incarceration. The film, "13th," is named for the constitutional amendment that abolished slavery with the exception of punishment for crime.

What is the unpredictable candidate’s policy when it comes to food safety—and the regulation of fast food restaurants? If his original statement is in any way representative, he wants a lot less regulation of food, arguing that it is both burdensome to farmers and “overkill.”

The star of the new Netflix series was reimagined as a modern black champion. The show's creative team looked to current events to ground Cage in reality from a specifically African American perspective. They wanted the show to fulfill “comic-book geek sensibilities” while also digging into subjects such as police brutality, the gentrification of Harlem (where the show takes place), and even the privatization of prisons.

It's not easy to discover that a loved one holds views (prejudices) inimical to your own. The Carolina-based poet Dan Albergotti offers an exquisitely balanced portrait of what happens at such moments of discovery.

A granular review of three recent books on the the political and intellectual legacy of French Marxian existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre. As the reviewer notes, if you want to know why 50,000 people showed up to pay their respects at the writer/activist's 1980 funeral, these new books may provide the answer.

This fresh look at the 1971 Attica, New York prison uprising, which was brutally repressed by then-Governor Nelson Rockefeller, is not just a history. It is an intervention into contemporary debates about the U.S. prison system.

Raoul Peck's new film 'I Am Not Your Negro' about James Baldwin has a powerful structure utilizing rare videos and photos and personal writings of Baldwin, and at the same time aligning them with contemporary issues of police brutality and race relations, creates a mesmerizing awareness of the continuity in the struggle for civil rights.

A deep dive into archival documents from the 1950s and 1960s produced compelling evidence that a sugar trade association not only paid for but also initiated and influenced research expressly to exonerate sugar as a major risk factor for coronary heart disease (CHD).