Portside

The book under review examines the rise of American capitalism, the visionary attempts by workers to resist and the housebreaking of a long-running anti-capitalist ethos from imaginative, frenzied opposition to diffuse, angry, but ultimate accommodation. While a residual 19th century fight-back culture built the CIO and defended the New Deal into the 1960s, it lacked the same emancipatory charge it had earlier, and unions shifted to cautious monitors of the working class

As Annette Gordon-Reed notes in this review, John Quincy Adams is probably best known through Steven Spielberg's portrayal of him, in the film Amistad, where he defends enslaved people who revolted aboard a slave ship. He was also a President of the United States and the son of a President. As we consider an election contest that might be one between two "dynastic" seekers of the office, this biography offers a look back at the first "dynastic" presidency.

A new book chronicles the travelers ignoring borders to spread ideas of liberty and equality, from the American revolution to the declaration of Haitian independence. "Without social media or even an international postal system," author Janet Polasky writes, "revolutionaries shared ideals of liberty and equality across entire continents." Decades before Marx, these internationalist radicals were soon betrayed by the very societies they helped build.