Portside

Labor educator Bob Bussel’s new book, Fighting For Total Person Unionism: Harold Gibbons, Ernest Calloway, and Working Class Citizenship (University of Illinois Press, 2016) describes a lesser-known effort to remake another Midwestern IBT local--without drawing the same kind of fire from Tobin’s successors, including Hoffa himself.

In his praise of Julie Dash's “Daughters of the Dust” during its initial theatrical release in 1992 critic Stephen Holden called it “a film of spellbinding visual beauty.” Now restoration of the film aims to bring more of that beauty to the forefront. The Cohen Film Collection announced that it has completed a digital restoration of “Daughters of the Dust” and plans to release that version theatrically this fall.

Since 1900 life expectancy at birth has risen from 47 to 79, nearly doubling the average American lifespan. But death rates of U.S. whites aged 45 to 54 increased by 8% from 1999-2013- all among whites with a high school education or less. But efforts to explain the numbers have confused or obscured race and class, creating much misunderstanding. As Jack Metzgar argues, there are no simple answers in describing trends for white workers without college degrees.

The perilous consequences of a Trump presidency should be a wake-up call for the left.

Last week, two important members of the civil rights and anti-war movements of the 1960s and 70s passed away.

Nick Turse's award-winning book, Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam was a harrowing historical journey for which he traveled to small villages on the back roads of Vietnam to talk to those who had experienced horrific crimes decades earlier. In 2015, however, on his second trip to South Sudan, a country the U.S. helped bring into existence, he found himself in an almost unimaginable place where the same kinds of war crimes were being committed.

The Romanian church, the aristocracy, and the state institutions inherited huge sums of wealth from the fruits of Roma slavery. Like on other slave-holding continents, after five centuries of brutalization and inhuman exploitation, the abusers received monetary compensation for freeing their Roma slaves.

During a recent visit to Vietnam, People's World sat down with Bui The Giang, the Director General for Western Europe and North America Affairs for the Communist Party of Vietnam's Commission of External Relations. In the course of this in-depth talk, Giang discussed Vietnam's journey towards economic prosperity, its commitment to sticking to a socialist trajectory, and efforts to preserve the legacy of revolutionary leader Ho Chi Minh.

Simran Sethi's book, "Bread, Wine, Chocolate: The Slow Loss of Foods We Love," is a call to arms: a warning of the dire consequences of what she sees as a disturbing lack of diversity in the foods we eat.

Gut dwellers signal immune cells to stay calm and dial down inflammation.