Showtime’s The Good Lord Bird uses the events around John Brown’s 1859 raid on Harpers Ferry to weave a fictional tale incorporating some basic insights and arguments about the nature of race in America. It did its most impressive work in presenting the wide spectrum of diverse African American responses to slavery and, in the process, offering a better sense of their humanity.
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Mark Lause looks at the 1793 yellow fever pandemic in Philadelphia from a working class history perspective, and finds it informs us today.
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Stephen Miller is the latest clone of Ann Coulter offered the public by the administration of President Donald J. Trump.
Read more →Governor Jerry Brown recently signed legislation boosting California’s minimum wage from $10 to $15 an hour — a 50 percent increase that made the state’s minimum wage the highest in the nation. The hike will be phased in over six years, then automatically adjusted annually to offset rising costs of living.
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Prof. James N. Gregory has performed a real service with his “Radicals in the Democratic Party, from Upton Sinclair to Bernie Sanders” (re-posted to Labor Online August 4) It provides an opportunity to explore what he raised—and chose not to raise—with reference to the current election.
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In 1886, several prominent European socialists came through Cincinnati in search of insights into America. Their local comrades–“delightful German-American friends” took them to a local dime museum. There, a showman introduced cowboys with “stereotyped speeches about them,” as his subjects lounged about “in their picturesque garb, and looking terribly bored.”
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A few years back, I got to visit the grave of an uncle buried overseas. He had been happily married to a wonderful wife and had two great little kids when he got his draft notice and reluctantly left to wind up in France in 1944.
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I doubt many my age can greet the end of school or the warm weather without thinking about baseball. When I was young, it certainly seemed as if the nineteenth century promoters who had worked so hard to make it “the American game” had succeeded.
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On March 14, Tony Benn, who had spent the better part of half a century in the British Parliament died. About twenty years ago, I had the privilege of hearing and meeting him at my university, from which his wife had graduated.
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