Portside

Gary Dorrien’s sweeping history of American democratic socialism weaves personal, intellectual, and spiritual narratives together in a book that reminds us of the great potential of the socialist movement.

A new anthology edited by Charisse Burden-Stelly and Jodi Dean highlights the legacy and enduring relevance of Black communist women’s political activism in the early 20th century.

The postwar Second Red Scare successfully smashed the American left. But in the midst of its devastation, a small number of old leftists refused to be shut up by the climate of fear. Without their heroism, the New Left could never have emerged.

“The Fifties,” by James R. Gaines, a former managing editor of Time, People and Life, reminds us that a trip in time to much of America then would resemble “The Handmaid’s Tale” more than “Ozzie and Harriet.”

Reluctant Reformers addresses what I think of as the tripwire of U.S. politics: race. But it does so by examining how several social movements, including abolition, women’s suffrage, populism, progressivism, labor, the socialist and communist left..