Portside

A quarter century ago, teaching a Native American History class at Duke, I noted that enrollment spiked after the release of Kevin Costner's blockbuster film about the post-Civil War West, Dances with Wolves. Sometime soon, Fox Searchlight Pictures is rolling out a movie about Nat Turner's 1831 Slave Revolt with the provocative title, Birth of a Nation. Though retired from the classroom, I find myself wondering whether another much-needed teaching moment is on the way.

The Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, crushed by China's military forces, no longer attract much editorial space, but the protests for freedom and the massacre that followed linger in history and in the conscience of the California poet Patrick Daly.

“I have ordered more people to attack other people than most of our generals have.”

Federal judge denies tribe's request for injunction, but federal agencies issue statement pausing pipeline construction

We never know what is actually possible until we test it. It may seem a long road from a union trying to protect jobs to a union setting out an alternative agenda for the economy. But surely the main lesson of recent years is that since capitalist corporations think big as a matter of course then we will surely lose if we continue to think small. If we don't raise our expectations, they will be lowered for us. •

Contrary to a too-commonly held assumption, book author Anne Trubeck argues that while writing by hand will likely become less practiced, it will not disappear, but evolve, as she insists its variegated world history amply shows. Just one possible precedent: the metamorphosis of letterpress printing into an artisanal form.

Reader Comments (Lots): Solidarity with Standing Rock Sioux Tribe against Dakota Access Pipeline - And Then the Dogs Came; America's Own Genocide; Slavery and the National Anthem; Sit with Colin Kaepernick; Woody Guthrie's Assault on 'Old Man Trump'; Donald Trump and White Voters; How Fugitive Slaves Kept Their Freedom - Deep in the Swamps; Black Lives Matter; Fred Hellerman; Gene Wilder; Solidarity with Yemen; Announcements; and more...

400 workers at Just Born Quality confections in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania have gone out on strike. The company's most famous product is Peeps. Management wants to replace their pension with a 401(K).