Portside

The new lynching memorial confronts the racial terrorism that corrupted America—and still does.

What is euphemistically referred to as “modernity” is marked with the indelible stain of what might be termed the Three Horsemen of the Apocalypse: Slavery, White Supremacy, and Capitalism, with the bloody process of human bondage as the driving and animating force of this abject horror.

Freedom on the Move from Cornell University is the first major digital database of fugitive slave ads from North America.

Du Bois biographer David Levering Lewis delivered a speech during the Du Bois 150th Birthday Celebration. Du Bois at age 95 was more radically unorthodox than virtually any other engaged intellectual of the 20th century. The real problem was really the manipulation of race in the service of wealth.

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How does our epoch of political polarization compare to the decade that was rent over the issue of slavery before the Civil War? Historical analogies can be misleading, but the controversies that bedeviled that age still haunt us. In certain ways, they foreshadow our own divided house.

Slavery did not die because it was unproductive or unprofitable, as some earlier historians have argued. Slavery was not some feudal remnant on the way to extinction.

We’ve identified people in our history who look and behave strikingly like the Koch brothers and their associates—specifically a small group that is mega-wealthy, super- privileged, highly self aware, morally self-confident, ideologically driven and deeply engaged in long-term efforts to seize the levers of government and upend American democracy. By this historian’s reckoning, it is, in general, the Old South’s slave owning aristocracy.

Graves form part of a collective memory of socialism. They force an acknowledgement of the ideas those revolutionaries died to defend. Fascism's armies sought to bury those ideas forever, along with the people who held them, in the Nazis' "thousand-year Reich." Learning lessons from Germany for our struggle against those that fought against racism, slavery, the Confederacy and white supremacy.