Portside

Rebel Crossings charts six 19th century socialists as they journey from the constraints of Old-World Britain to a New-World America. They were part of a wider historical search for self-fulfillment and an alternative to a cruelly competitive capitalism. The book surveys the interaction of feminism, socialism and anarchism, bringing fresh slants on political and cultural movements and upon influential individuals including Walt Whitman, Eleanor Marx, and William Morris.

Labor historian E.P. Thompson is perhaps best known for his monumental and path-breaking work, The Making of the English Working Class. The collected essays reviewed here, many either out-of-print or difficult to obtain, were written between 1955 and 1963. They show Thompson as also a dedicated educator of workers, a sharp polemicist, a skilled political theorist and a tireless agitator for peace, against nuclear weapons and for a rebirth of the socialist project.