Portside

Two recent books employ inventive approaches to read against the grain of the archive left by those who defended and benefited from human bondage.

Though little remembered now, at the turn of the 20th century Cleveland’s socialists heroically fought Samuel Gompers for leadership of the American Federation of Labor — putting forward a revolutionary alternative to Gompers’s conservative unionism.

In his new book, Unions, Race, and Popular Democracy: Building a Progressive Labor Movement (Cornell), sociology professor Kim Scipes examines parallel efforts to build two CIO unions in the Midwest—via the Steel Workers and Packinghouse Workers.

A century ago, Mexican American families came together to build an adobe church near the border in West Texas. Can its bell toll again as the wall expansion nears?

Any post-MAGA renewal of democracy starts with a federal right to vote. But it hardly ends there.

In 1948, a US-sponsored dictatorship in South Korea launched a brutal campaign of repression on the island of Jeju. Having killed up to 30,000 people — one islander in ten — Washington’s Korean clients covered up the evidence of the crime for decades

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Federally qualified health centers are an essential source of medical care for poor and working-class Americans, especially in rural areas and neighborhoods of color. Medicaid cuts in Donald Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill could shut them down.

Detention was sold as both a law-and-order necessity and an economic opportunity, welding together the rac­ist politics of the drug war with the rise of private prisons.