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One Big Union

Michael Kazin The Nation
The Red Scare and the fall of the IWW. A new history examines the lost promise and fierce persecution of the IWW.

This Week in People’s History, May 16 . . .

Portside
Member of Congress using a whip to drive Lady Liberty out of the U.S. Capitol 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.

The Red Scare Took Aim at Black Radicals Like Langston Hughes

Peter Dreier Jacobin
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.

A Regional Reign of Terror

Eric Foner The New York Review
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.

The Great Slave Strike That Helped End Slavery

Mark A. Lause Jacobin
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.

Abraham Lincoln Is a Hero of the Left

Matthew E. Stanley Jacobin
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.

Tidbits – Feb. 16, 2023 – Reader Comments: States Can Tax the Rich; Black Studies Vital, Necessary; History Seeing ‘Socialism’ Under Every Bed; Ukraine War; Ohio Train Derailment; Holly Near Tribute; Paul Robeson 125th Birthday Celebration; More…

Portside
Reader Comments: States Can Tax the Rich; Black Studies Vital, Necessary; History of Seeing 'Socialism' Under Every Bed; Ukraine War; Ohio Train Derailment; Holly Near Tribute; Paul Robeson 125th Birthday Celebration; Cartoons; lots of Announcements;
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