Rachel Maddow’s podcast tells the story of American Nazis in the 1940s. But the era’s real and lasting authoritarian danger came from the spectacular growth of a national security state.
The Red Scare and the fall of the IWW. A new history examines the lost promise and fierce persecution of the IWW.
Chi Boy is part memoir, part social history, part eulogy for his ancestors, and part tribute to men whose literary output continues to inspire him.
President Wilson unleashes repression of peace advocates. Republican Party denounces slave trade as a ‘crime against humanity.’ First compulsory public education. Camden draft protestors acquitted. Wiretapping gets the nod. Amnesty for Confederates.
Poet Langston Hughes was invited to speak at Occidental College on this day in 1948, then uninvited when red-baiters released a report calling him a “subversive.” His story shows how the postwar Red Scare targeted radicals, particularly black leftists.
Most Americans now grasp that violence was essential to the functioning of slavery, but a new book excavates the lesser known brutality of everyday Black life in the Jim Crow South.
Today, on Presidents’ Day, we rightly celebrate Abraham Lincoln for helping end slavery. But we shouldn’t forget the unstoppable force that also brought down the Slave Power: the several million slaves who left the plantation, many of whom joined the Union Army.
Peniel Joseph’s history of the three Reconstructions.
From Karl Marx to Eugene Debs to 1930s American Communists, leftists have regarded Lincoln as a prolabor hero who played a crucial role in vanquishing chattel slavery. We should celebrate him today as part of the great radical democratic tradition.
In 1934, American Communists translated a Stalinist book about revolution into a children’s game. Curiously, it didn't catch on.
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