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Literature’s Inherited Trauma

Nur Nasreen Ibrahim The Millions
Jesmyn Ward is best known for her novel Salvage the Bones (2011). In this new book, says reviewer Ibrahim, "she traces an American highway odyssey, from the Mississippi Gulf Coast to Parchman Farm, the notorious state penitentiary."

A Century Ago, the Working Class Redefined Peace

Liz Payne Morning Star
One day after the Revolution, the Soviet government issued a Decree of Peace -- a signal of the centrality of the struggle against war to the building of socialism.

Unprecedented Spending A Threat to Voting Rights, Unions in Illinois

Curtis Black Chicago Reporter
Gov. Bruce Rauner is on track to spend $50 million on legislative races this year. Even for a guy like Rauner, that’s a lot of money– nearly twice what he spent on his own campaign two years ago. Two Rauner allies, billionaires Ken Griffin and Richard Uihlein, are also spending tens of millions of dollars. The end game is taking down unions and squelching voting rights.

The Election is Rigged After All

Eliza Newlin Carney / Hendrik Hertzberg / Jennifer L. Clark The American Prospect
Voting rights advocates have won a string of court battles, but state election officials have found ways to restrict early voting anyway—often at the behest of GOP leaders. ----- Rethinking about our two party system and our election system: Ranked-choice voting opens up elections to a broader, more diverse range of candidates and ideas. ----- Modernizing our voter registration system.

Booked: When Slaveholders Controlled the Government, with Matthew Karp

Timothy Shenk Dissent Magazine
Historians are so accustomed to viewing slaveholders at the top of a complex pyramid of class, racial, and gender hierarchies in Southern society that we forgot that they were also the nation’s most powerful political leaders, and the world’s most powerful slaveholding class. Only in the past fifteen years or so have historians begun to look more systematically at slaveholders as leading national and international actors, as well as Southern social elites.

Rank-and-File Union Members Speak Out at Standing Rock Camp

ICTMN Staff Indian Country Today
Rank-and-File Union Members Challenge AFL-CIO Leadership's Support for Pipeline. A delegation from Labor For Standing Rock, comprised of rank-and-file workers and union members to mobilize growing labor support for the First Nation's fight against the Dakota Access Pipeline at the Standing Rock camp the weekend of October 29.