Portside

I celebrate Radical Reconstruction, a brief moment of glory, no matter how blindly and halfheartedly we, as a nation, did it. Did Reconstruction end racism? No. Does that make it a failure? No again. Considering it a failure is like considering the civil rights movement a failure because it only abolished segregation and not racism.

Many food and beverage marketers have started playing the clean label and sustainable card. Such terms as “artisan,” “clean,” “earth friendly,” “local,” “pure” and “simple” are being used on product packages and web sites. Avoiding ambiguity is a key issue for staying out of legal trouble.

The worldwide cultural revolution initiated by the invention of records and record players has been vast and helps define what it has meant to be both "modern" and "post-modern." In this new book, Michael Denning surveys the scope and breadth of this revolution. Noise Uprising, says reviewer Tim Barker, "offers an ambitious, if somewhat speculative map of the connections" between the dizzying array of styles and genres of modern popular, vernacular music.

Formed in 1966, the Black Panther Party for Self Defense remains misunderstood and poorly represented – especially on film. The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution tries to sort the fact from fiction.

Consumers gravitate to favorite mouthfeel behaviors, whether it involves chewing, crunching, "smooshing" or sucking. The Understanding & Insight Group (U&I) has found a previously unrevealed, unexpressed need that drives texture preferences: mouth behavior. The truth is that individuals have a preferred way to manipulate food in their mouths (mouth behavior) and this BEHAVIOR determines the food textures they will prefer.

AMC's "Humans" demonstrates exactly how complicated it is to outsource something as personal as domestic work and care.

Labor Day Weekend, a time to acknowledge the burdens of hard work, Washington state poet Ira Woodward plays on the phrase "raising the floor"--meaning not only a moment to rest, but also time to raise the wages of working people.

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.