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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Joshua Morris has published The Many Worlds of American Communism in September. Morris completed his Ph.D. at Wayne State University and teaches at Grand Valley State University in Michigan. Randi Storch asked him some questions about his purpose and findings.
Read more →While labor historians have organized a letter signing campaign to the Biden administration asking them to grant some concession to rail workers, others have pointed out the continuing tepid response of labor leadership as the cause of this crisis. Is the Democratic Party in charge of the labor movement?
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Rails, Jails, & Trolleys is a feature-length documentary, directed by Henna Mann and produced by the South Asian Studies Institute (SASI) at the University of the Fraser Valley in British Columbia. The documentary highlights the timeline of the historic Farmers’ Movement in India and the Canadian diaspora’s response to it.
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Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the death of Mikhail Gorbachev this year have sparked renewed interest in the USSR’s 1991 disintegration, a moment that officially brought an end to the Cold War.
Historians have been prominent in the many recent discussions and debates about how the demise of the Soviet Union thirty years ago set the stage for Vladimir Putin’s rise to power, the controversial expansion of NATO, and the current war in Ukraine.
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Staughton Lynd, one of labor history’s icons, died on November 17. He was an academic and activist when those combinations were reviled as unbecoming of a professional, and he was blacklisted from the profession for his bold anti-war stance. He became a labor attorney, moved to Niles, Ohio and was a strategic player in the fight against steel-mill shutdowns and the destruction of steel communities in Youngstown, Ohio.
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Editor’s Note: We select a featured essay from each issue of Labor: Studies in Working Class History. We’ve never featured a film review, and so it’s great to make available Richard Wells’ essay, Class Politics and the Filmmakers’s Craft in Mike Leigh’s Peterloo from issue 19:3 on the film Peterloo, released in 2018.
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Over five decades of organizing, we’ve seen the power of story to move people. We wanted to write about the workers Imbole Mbue calls “the deliberately unheard” – those who clean bloody hospital sheets, forge parts for sewer pipes, arrange flights or process checks, all while caring for kids, holding relationships together and wrestling with multiple forms of oppression.
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This is the fourth and final 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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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.
Read more →