Portside

Do we want to provide care for the most vulnerable members of our society, or do we want this to just be a business where real estate owners are making money, and we don’t really care...

This is not the first time that an uprising against anti-Black racism has opened the door to significant change. There’s the little known rebellion of Black Air Force personnel at Travis Air Force Base in California in May 1971.

As calls to defund police grow, peacemakers on the frontlines of Chicago’s gun violence epidemic have dramatically reduced homicides and shootings.

Sharp reductions in spending on police, prisons, and the Pentagon could free up hundreds of billions of dollars for programs that might begin to fill the gap in spending on public investments in communities of color and elsewhere.

At a time when we desperately need scientific leadership, what we’ve got is a rogues’ gallery of frauds and flatterers who see the pandemic as a career move.

Mathematically speaking, this system is built to virtually ensure narrow victories, making it very susceptible to efforts to change either voters’ minds or the records of their choices.

The appearance in English of the three volumes of Karl Marx’s Capital, published by the Chicago-based socialist publisher, Charles H. Kerr & Company between 1906 and 1909, marked a significant event in the global dissemination of socialist thought.

During the 19th century,the U.S. government encouraged the extermination of the bison as a means to subdue Native Americans and facilitate the country’s western expansion.

There was slavery in Illinois for more than 100 years. Even after Illinois entered the Union, loopholes in its laws allowed the practice to continue, making the future Land of Lincoln a quasi-slave state. 

Author Caleb Carr's The Alienist explores the 19th century psychiatric debate between free will and determinism. TNT's nearly identical adaptation of the novel, however, comes up with a completely different conclusion.