Skip to main content

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

Friday Nite Videos | November 10, 2021

Portside
Union Busting | John Oliver. The Real Charlie Chaplin | Trailer. Bernie Sanders: Why I’m Voting Against the Defense Spending Bill. Colin in Black and White | Trailer. AOC: "What Is So Hard About Saying That This Is Wrong?"
Subscribe to Hollywood Blacklist