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This Week in People’s History, Apr 22–28, 2026

Portside
Mushroom cloud rising from Yucca Flats on April 22, 1952 Duck and Cover (1952), Long Fight for School Integration (1951), U.S. Out of Vietnam! (1971), Springsteen Channels Seeger (2006), Take Your Blacklist and Shove It! (1951), Building US Prison Camps (1951), No Job’s Worth Dying For (1971)

Repression in the Classroom

Paul Buhle Monthly Review
Repression on campus is back in a big way, as readers far beyond the classroom know today. The saga of the Cold War years, once seemingly distant, now has lessons that we ignore to our peril.

The Red Scare Is American Past and Present

Benjamin Balthaser Jacobin
If we want to understand how we arrived in this authoritarian moment in 2025, we need to understand one of the central pathways that brought us here: McCarthyism.

Tidbits- July 31-Readers Comments: Trump Screwing Country, World, Climate, Gaza, Now Ready To Make Deal With Sex Trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell; McCarthyism and Its Victims; Keep ICE out of MLB Stadiums; Israelis Call for Crippling Sanctions on Israel

Portside
Readers Comments: Trump Screwing Country, World, Climate, Gaza, Now Ready to Make Deal with Sex Trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell; McCarthyism and Its Victims: Here We Go Again; Keep ICE Out of MLB Stadiums; Israelis Call for Crippling Sanctions on Israel

books

Tony Kahn: Boy Fugitive in the Cold War

Paul Buhle Portside
This is a poignant tale of remembering parents in trouble, careers dashed and of steady FBI harassment. The end is not happy, except that the boy survives and makes his own life as an admired cultural commentator on radio.

How Stanley Kubrick’s Spartacus Broke the Hollywood Blacklists

Taylor Dorrell Jacobin
Telling the story of a slave revolt in ancient Rome, the 1960 film Spartacus was penned by two blacklisted Communist writers. Its arrival in theaters was a middle finger to the McCarthyist witch hunt in Hollywood and publishing.

The Legacy of Clinton Jencks

Michael Myerson Monthly Review
In the postwar-Cold War period U.S. corporations used anti-communist hysteria to attack the labor movement. Salt of the Earth - tells the story of heroic Mexican American mineworkers, and the International Union of Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers.
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