A new book on the ill-fated German revolution is exhaustive while casting doubt on the possibility of a successful workers’ uprising. The reviewer prefers an out-of-print work that faults the Social Democratic right for saving the extant ruling class
Some saw the collapse of the German Empire as a decisive and traumatic break in the historical continuity of the state. Nothing, in the book author’s view, more profoundly exemplified this revolt against history than National Socialism.
Historians debate to what extent the Treaty of Versailles was responsible for Hitler’s march to World War II, but there can be little doubt that the treaty ending the “War to End All Wars” continues to be a major factor in our “War Without End."
Review of a bravura feature length documentary on the life and struggles of militant union leader, socialist orator, five-time presidential candidate against the two-party duopoly and class war prisoner for opposing America’s imperialist entry into World War 1.
Historians of the bourgeois persuasion tend to focus on the doings of major figures in history. Less emphasis is placed by them on the role of working people, often nameless and ill-remembered. Edward Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class was a methodological breakthrough in showing how a working class made itself. The book under review follows that precedent, charting how ordinary Europeans from the Middle Ages to post-Soviet Europe made their own history.
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