Zora Neale Hurston is one of the greatest literary and anthropologist treasures in American history, despite her dying completely forgotten and in poverty in 1960. Her 1931 novel Barracoon is finally
At the end of last year, I put up a list of the books I read for professional reasons in 2016. People seemed to like it, so here is this year’s list. Just as a refresher, I read these books for
To discuss something other than politics (well, not really since what is more political than our understanding of the past), I am teaching a graduate seminar in Environmental History. Here is the read
Above: Free Angela Davis poster, Havana, 1971 I start each and every day by reading a couple of chapters of a history (or related) book. I do this primarily to keep up on the literature, making it pos
Above: A man too dangerous for Texas prisoners The U.S. prison system is primarily designed to lock up people of color, control their labor, and humiliate them. There is very little about justice in t
As I am desperately trying to write the draft of my book on strikes, one of the things I’ve had to sacrifice is writing book reviews here. They take too long to do well. But I did want to note a
On March 15, 1940, John Ford’s film version of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, was released to universal acclaim. This was perhaps the greatest moment of the cultural left during the
Yesterday, in a different forum, our valued commenter Bijan Parsia complained about Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States. Basically, his complaint, if I may summarize, is