When Notre Dame Cathedral caught fire in Paris on April 15, 400 firefighters were deployed to tackle the blaze. One of those workers was seriously injured, and two police officers were also hurt. Emergency workers risked their lives to remove artefacts from the burning cathedral, but most reports emphasized the value of the artefacts and artworks rather than the people who saved them.
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Our series on new books in labor and working-class history continues with Aline Helg’s Slave No More: Self-Liberation before Abolitionism in the Americas, which UNC Press is publishing in English this month. Helg, a professor of history at the University of Geneva, answered questions from Jacob Remes.
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I live in a relatively affluent predominantly white neighbourhood in the South of England. One day in the city centre I am approached by an older white homeless man; he is weaving, unwashed, I can smell alcohol on his breath. He asks me for money and I politely refuse, as I feel uncertain and unsafe.
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For the past forty years, Alice Kessler-Harris has been on the vanguard of labor history and of women’s and gender history. Last summer, I joined Tony Michels and Annie Polland in a wide-ranging conversation with Kessler-Harris about her life and work.
Read more →LAWCHA is pleased to have solicited and endorsed several panels at the 2019 OAH Conference in Philadelphia. We hope to see you there.
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You can tell that Medicare for All is becoming a real possibility when it gets a rigorous cost-benefit analysis and when its advocates start seriously raising and addressing the inevitable downsides of the policy. There is no greater downside to Medicare for All than the 1.8
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There is a growing awareness that wealth inequality is directly affecting everyman. All politicians recite the pledge to help the middle class, republicans with more supply side solutions and democrats with tax plans.
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The working class currently has remarkable visibility in US political culture. In defiance of a longstanding belief in America’s classlessness, even today’s sitting president publicly acknowledges America’s “working class.” However dramatically Donald Trump is breaking some political norms, though, the particular way he uses the phrase working class is completely consistent with trends that have been emerging within mainstream US politics for decades.
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Paul Buhle reviews The Socialist Party of America: A Complete History, by Jack Ross (2015)
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