books

The Butler's Child - A Revolutionary Civil Rights Lawyer

Bob Zellner East Hampton Star (Long Island, NY)
The timeliness of The Butler's Child has just been demonstrated by the death of a black man in Baton Rouge at the hands of two ill trained young white police officers. Fifty years ago Steel thought of the Deep South as a dangerous and racist place. Today, however, it has become clear that racism and trigger-happy cops are national phenomena.

"The Crucible" a Stunning Parable of McCarthyism's Attack on America

Lucy Komisar The Komisar Scoop
A crucible is a pot in which metals or other substances are heated to a very high temperature or melted. Miller's story is about events that took place in Salem, Massachusetts in 1692. But it's really about the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), America's thought police of the early 50s, which burned through American rights and professed values. It's the best play of the season.(Closes July 17, 2016)

Philadelphia’s Forgotten Spirit of 1776

Sam Pizzigati Campaign for America's Future
The struggle for independence upset the “politics of deference.” The colonial elites, explains historian Clement Fatovic, found it “more and more difficult” to reconcile “great disparities of wealth with the animating principles of the Revolution.”

What You Still Don’t Know About Abolitionists

Manisha Sinha TIME
The abolition movement was an interracial radical social movement of disfranchised people, men and women, white and black, free and enslaved. Slave resistance lay at its heart. On this Juneteenth, it is important to recall that African Americans were not passive recipients of the gift of freedom but architects of their own liberation.

Trumpism In The Context Of American History; Why Some Union Members Vote Against Their Own Interests

Van Gosse; Mark Pazniokas
Trump's strategy and campaign is to appeal to majority white, working class voters who have economic anxiety and fear of demographic change. Trump's candidacy viewed in the context of historical continuity - nativism is a primary political discourse in American history. Trump has shown us that it is just as powerful now as in the 1850s or the 1920s. Indeed, "Make America Great Again" recalls the 1920s Ku Klux Klan's appeal for "100% Americanism."

Sixty Years Ago: Congressional Red-Hunters Set Their Sights on Bridgeport

Andy Piascik Portside
Passed into law in 1940, the Smith Act made it illegal to "teach, advocate or encourage the overthrow" of the government and extended to any member of an organization that allegedly did so. The notion that in 1956 the Communist Party was interested in, let alone capable of, overthrowing anything was patently absurd. From a 1940's peak of around 80,000, the CP's national membership had dwindled to perhaps 10,000 by the time of the hearings in Connecticut.

books

Messer-Kruse's Contentious Haymarket History

Rebecca Hill Against the Current
In left labor circles, it's been a settled question that the Haymarket martyrs, victims of ruling class justice, were framed, and May Day's radical origins are based on remembering the martyrs. The author of the books under review, using a close reading of the trial record, supports the court finding that the accused anarchists conspired to murder police during the epochal 1886 labor demonstration in Chicago. The reviewer strongly disputes the author's conclusions.

The Easter Rising 100 Years On: How The Irish Revolution Fired Up American Politics

David Brundage The Conversation
Irish immigrants and their descendants (our “exiled children in America,” in the words of the Proclamation of the Irish Republic) played a leading part in the Easter Rising. But the influences and inspiration worked in the other direction as well, especially in the tumultuous years following the Easter Rising.
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