Chad Pearson recently interviewed Bryan Palmer about this new book, James P. Cannon and the Emergence of Trotskyism in the United States, 1928-1938 (Leiden and Boston: Brill 2020; Chicago: Haymarket, 2021).
Why did you write this book?
There are many levels on which one could answer such a question.
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This essay is the third contribution to our symposium on Tom Alter’s new book, Toward a Cooperative Commonwealth: The Transplanted Roots of Farmer-Labor Radicalism in Texas, published recently by University of Illinois Press. We started with Kyle Wilkison’s analysis of the book’s contribution and survey of previous literature.
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Jonathan Daniel Wells’ The Kidnapping Club: Wall Street, Slavery and Resistance on the Eve of the Civil War exposes the role of Wall Street, powerful judges, politicians, lawyers and police officers in kidnapping African-Americans and sending them South to enslavement, showing the way that New York’s powerful kept slavery and the slave trade alive.
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Chad Pearson offers comments on employer violence in understanding workplace injury as part of a roundtable on Nate Holdren’s Injury Impoverished: Workplace Accidents, Capitalism, and Law in the Progressive Era, just published by Cambridge University Press. Holdren delves into the history of the emergence of workers’ compensation law in the United States.
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Chad Pearson interviews Mark Lause on his new book, The Great Cowboy Strike: Bullets, Ballots and Class Conflicts in the American West, which subverts American mythology to reveal the class abuses and inequalities that have blinded a nation to its true history and nature.
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Readers of the LAWCHA blog will be interested in a few of the different leftist interpretations of the meaning of American independence and the revolutionary experience.
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How should Americans remember Woodrow Wilson? This is the central question triggered recently by Princeton University protesters who have brought attention to his racism. The protesters have rightly pointed out the loathsome words and actions of the turn-of-the-century pro-segregationist academic, former Princeton head, and two-term United States president.
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A number of the historians in the audience at the 2014 Organization of American Historian’s session on the state of political history in the post-1945 period were pleased to learn that a new edition of the Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order will soon be released.
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Historians should think carefully as they ponder the meaning of the UAW defeat in Chattanooga. Some analysts write as though a full-fledged co-determination structure was in play. In reality, the union leadership held backroom meetings with Volkswagen executives that promised a commitment that seems all too close to the kind of company unions that labor historians should recognize from the past—joint labor-management organizations designed to lure workers away from democratic control and a voice.
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