Portside

Reflections on Richard White’s The Republic for Which It Stands: The United States during Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865-1896

Currently around 30 percent of black men in Florida, Alabama, and Mississippi are not eligible to vote because of felony disenfranchisement laws. Meanwhile, these felony disenfranchisement laws create a new class of criminals: people who vote while ineligible.

A few years ago, a room full of techies — ​shorthand for white-collar tech employees, usually software engineers or computer programmers — gathered to organize their industry was unthinkable.

Trump is giving ICE the tools, financial resources, and presidential backing to go after immigrant communities as never before. Among its most important and powerful supporters is the labor union that represents ICE’s agents.

Review of a bravura feature length documentary on the life and struggles of militant union leader, socialist orator, five-time presidential candidate against the two-party duopoly and class war prisoner for opposing America’s imperialist entry into World War 1.

We should honor and celebrate the role of the Asian American and Pacific Islander community in the struggle to advance the cause of worker justice in years past and in our present.

Lula’s crime was to be a worker and a popular political leader in an elitist country. The challenge for the left is to rebuild a democratic movement that will put the political system, the media, the judicial system and the state at the service of political freedom.

There’s a clear recognition here that there can be no racial reconciliation without a serious reckoning with the truth, and that the truth of history can never be unmade. Facing history can be agonizing, painful, sometimes horrifying—the Memorial is an unambiguous statement of that fact.

The renowned Renaissance literary scholar Stephen Greenblatt, whose 1980 book, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare, was a landmark study, has now turned his attention to Shakespeare's treatment of tyrants. Michael Thomas Barry looks at this new, timely volume.

The Guardian’s review of claims made against US Customs and Border Protection over the last dozen years shows cause for concern over unreasonable search and seizure.