Portside

Across the political spectrum, Americans whitewash the working class and exclude labor struggle from black history. Blair LM Kelley’s Black Folk: The Roots of the Black Working Class is a necessary corrective — and provides lessons for struggle today

In American Slavers, Sean M. Kelley surveys the relatively unknown history of Americans who traded in slaves in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Deadly weather in 2005. KKK run out of town in 1923. FBI informers mess up in 1973. The telephone industry discovers women workers in 1878. TV news is ready for prime time in 1963. Frederick Douglass frees himself in 1838. Ethnic cleansing in 1838.

"First Amendment, what's that?" in 1918. GIs sit-in, go to jail in 1968. An invasion is an invasion in 1968. KKK run out of town in 1923. Lead paint deadly in 1983 (and it still is). Trying to outlaw war in 1928. March on Washington in 1963.

DNA from enslaved Black workers at a 19th century iron forge links them to living descendants. But the research swirls with ethical questions

Critics of the Supreme Court think it has lost its claim to legitimacy. But proposals for reforming it must strike a balance with preserving its power and independence, which remain essential to our constitutional system.

Documenting the Vietnam War in 1969. War crime in Yemen in 2018. Face-masks protect from pandemic in 1918. Hip-hop is born in 1973. White House report doesn't see race in 1938. Blowin' In the Wind dropped in 1963. Springfield Massacre in 1908.

Pinochet's men accused of Letelier murder in 1978. Dick Cheney's hypocrisy in 2000. Reagan's racist dog-whistle in 1980. Dixiecrats defend the poll tax in 1948. Chicago Freedom Movement in 1966. Birth of a hero in 1848. Toxic-waste emergency in 1978.

The economic consequences of capitalism’s profit-driven movement out of its old centers (Western Europe, North America, and Japan) brought capitalism there to its current crisis.

Alabama tries to ban the NAACP in 1956. Freedom Summer under the gun in 1964. Cigarette health warning in 1965. Protesters killed in DC in 1932. "Fight for 15" in 2013. Federal health insurance for some in 1965. Black Power in 1966.