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This Week in People’s History, Jan 28-Feb 3, 2026

Portside
The Space Shuttle Challenger Explosion An Endless Coverup (1986), Genocide’s the Real Crime (1996), Whites Kill, Blacks Do Time (1966), Andrew Jackson, Ahead of His Time (1834), How Did President Wilson Sleep? (1921), Wars Kill, But Mum’s the Word (1991), John Kennedy, Movie Fan (1961)

The Radical Who Invented Robin Hood

Mat Coward Morning Star
An 18th-century scholar and revolutionary democrat Joseph Ritson turned a medieval outlaw into England’s people’s hero — and blacklisted writers popularized his story for a new generation in the 1950s TV show.

This Week in People’s History, Aug 27-Sep 2, 2025

Portside
The cover of the 1950 Red Channels blacklist-promoting pamphlet Show-Business Witchhunters Hit Paydirt (1950), Jim Crow Justice, Ugly as Sin (1955), Los Angeles Deputies Sow Deadly Chaos (1970), Like a Rolling Stone (1965), What’s In a Name? (2015), This Land Is Your Land . . . (1945), Familiar Sentiments (1945)

books

McCarthyism and Its Victims: Here We Go Again?

Paul Buhle Portside
Repression is certainly in the air, its effects likely to be as chilling as intended: people are afraid and have good reasons to be afraid. Reviews of two recent books on Elizabeth Gurley Flynn and the Long War Against American Communism.

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.

This Week in People’s History, Mar. 12–18

Portside
Huge pile of abandoned streetcars on the scrap-heap Who Wrecked the Trains? (in 1949), Forward Ever, Backward Never! (1979), Take Your Blacklist and Shove It! (1954), Ain't Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me 'Round (1964), Paris Commune and Marx (1884), Terror in Nicaragua (1984), Terror in Arkansas (1899)

books

Hollywood Is a Union Town, but the History Is Complicated

Steven Wishnia The Indypendent
The American movie industry has been one of the most consistently unionized sectors of the economy since the 1930s — but to achieve that, workers had to overcome “the iron fist of the moguls” and organized crime, says historian Gerald Horne
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