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American Artists Against War, 1935-2010

Paul Buhle Special to Portside
This new book traces the antiwar work of visual artists in the United States over the last eighty years. Paul Buhle offers some useful context for understanding this widely varied scope of creative activity as it ranged from antifascist paintings and murals to the poster art of the Vietnam War years to the politically engaged art of the current era.

Interview: 'This Changes Everything': Naomi Klein & Avi Lewis Film Re-imagines Vast Challenge of Climate Change

Amy Goodman Democracy Now
'This Changes Everything', which re-imagines the vast challenge of climate change, is directed by filmmaker Avi Lewis and inspired by journalist Naomi Klein’s international best-selling book by the same name. Over the course of four years, the pair traveled to nine countries on five continents to profile communities on the front lines of the climate justice movement.

How Suffragists Used Cookbooks As A Recipe For Subversion

NINA MARTYRIS NPR
Between 1886, when the first American suffragist cookbook was published, and 1920, when the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution granted women the right to vote, at least a half-dozen cookbooks were published by suffragette associations in the country. They came garnished with propaganda for the Great Cause: the fight for getting women the right to vote. The suffrage cookbooks came garnished with propaganda for the Great C

Can’t You Hear the Children?

Fred Norman Portside.org
War veteran Fred Norman devotes his writing to Peace. His mantra: Each night I ask myself/what did I do today/to end the wars?//If I answer back with/"Nothing"/then the dead that day/are mine.//I beg of them forgiveness.

Can "Solidarity Unionism" Save the Labor Movement?

Eric Dirnbach Waging Nonviolence
In any case, union contracts and the working conditions they codify are the current compromise between labor and capital in any given workplace. With or without a contract, workers will have to struggle. Staughton Lynd doesn't seem to consider the possibility that some workers may not be looking for constant class warfare on the job, and that settling a decent contract offers a much needed respite to lock-in gains.

Negroland

Rebecca Hussey Bookslut
The numbers tell us that the African American upper middle and upper classes are little more than a sliver of those classes as a whole. In what Rebecca Hussey calls a "formally innovative" new memoir, Pulitzer Prize-winning critic Margo Jefferson shows us what it is like to have grown up in this tiny world during the latter half of the last century.

Review: She's No Radical! 'Suffragette' Would Rather Show Women Suffering Than Building Bombs

Alan Sherstul Village Voice
The conversion-narrative approach that Suffragette is rooted in precludes a structure as savvy as what we saw in Ava DuVernay's exquisite Selma, a film of negotiation and confrontation — and one that presumed this was no viewer's first day in this world. Suffragette expends its energy selling us on what we already believe rather than examining the way these activists pressed the world into believing it

The People's Period Piece

Tirdad Derakhshani The Inquirer
Steven Soderbergh's period medical drama, The Knick, which kicked off its second season on Oct. 16, has been praised for its vivid characterization, realism, historical accuracy, and visual style.

Amending Wall

Darrel Alejandro Holnes Heartjournalonline
The New York-based poet Darrel Alejandro Holnes addresses the matter of walls--geographic boundaries, borders, fences--that attempt to delineate the peoples on different sides and the ultimate hypocrisy, futility of the effort.