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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Nat LaCour connected civil rights unionism to teachers’ struggle to build union democracy. A remembrance and evaluation.
The United Teachers of New Orleans (UTNO) defy assumptions about anti-union right-to-work Louisiana. As a small, mostly segregated Black local, in 1966, they held the first teachers strike in the South.
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We are glad to take this article from behind a paywall link at the Labor: Studies in Working Class History, and are grateful that Duke University Press will make it free for the next two months. And we are grateful that the authors, Gordon Mantler and Rachel Riedner, have provided an update for us.
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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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This is an English translation of a review first published https://commonware.org/recensioni/vite-di-commessi-elettori-le-elezioni-americane-e-la-middle-class )
Sarah Jones reviews The Sinking Middle Class by David Roediger
“Once in my life I would like to own something outright before it was broken,” says Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman.
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In his fascinating new book, Aaron Goings interrogates the legend of Billy Gohl (1873-1927), a union official accused of dozens of murders. He seeks to bring light to the accusations that have made Gohl a true-crime figure in local popular culture.
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In the spring of 2019, workers at the University of South Carolina (UofSC) organized after a controversial university Presidential search highlighted campus-wide dissatisfaction with the Board of Trustees (BoT). This cultivated a feeling among workers that we lacked a voice in campus affairs.
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Early in September, Polk County Iowa District Judge Jeffrey Farrell ruled that state officials had the right to overrule local school boards in decisions about when and how they might open for instruction during the current pandemic. He asserted, “Whether right or wrong, that is their decision to make.”
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A People’s History of Life and Labor in the San Gabriel Valley: An Interview with authors and editors of East of East: The Making of Greater El Monte (Rutgers, 2020).
We’re here to talk about East of East: The Making of Greater El Monte, a collection of 31 essays edited by Romeo Guzmán, Carribean Fragoza, Alex Sayf Cummings, and Ryan Reft.
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Our series of interviews with authors of new books in labor and working-class history continues with Ryan Pettengill, author of the new book, Communists and Community: Activism in Detroit’s Labor Movement, 1941-1956, published by Temple University Press this year. Pettengill teaches at Mountain View College.
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