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Anvil, the Forgotten Magazine of Heartland Marxism

Marc Blanc Jacobin
Printed out of a cattle barn in Missouri, Anvil published some of the biggest leftist writers of the 1930s, including Richard Wright and Langston Hughes. Its popular vision for multiracial socialism in the heart of the US could hardly be more urgent.

The Reckless Creation of Whiteness

Erin L. Thompson The Nation
In The Unseen Truth, Sarah Lewis examines how an erroneous 18th-century story about the “Caucasian race” led to a centuries of prejudice and misapprehension.

History’s Lessons on Anti-Immigrant Extremism

Michael Luo The New Yorker
The scale of what Trump has promised is difficult to fathom and without recent precedent. A century and a half ago, however, a movement to cast out a different group of people began to accelerate in the United States.

books

Grave New World

David Klion Bookforum
This book starts by saying that the 9/11 attacks "occurred at a moment when “the United States found itself at the head of a global economic order that had been founded on a growth surge that was slowly but surely running out of steam."

The Making of the Springfield Working Class

Gabriel Winant The New York Review of Books
Each generation of this country’s workforce has always been urged to detest the next—to come up with its own fantasies of cat-eating immigrants.

Bring American Communists out of the Shadows — and Closets

David Bacon Jacobin
20th century American Communist Party members were portrayed as the Red Menace, an enemy within. In reality, they were ordinary people with extraordinarily complex intellectual, political, social, and romantic lives that deserve to be chronicled.

The Constitution and the American Left

Azia Rana Dissent Magazine
A culture of reverence for the U.S. Constitution shields the founding document from criticism, despite its many shortcomings. We need an alternative vision that provides meaningful freedom at home and embraces self-determination abroad.
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