History Archives - Page 4 of 13

Colonization

A Pencil For Your Land

Ngũgĩ and Achebe on colonial public school

September 20, 2021 • by Casper Andersen

_____ Oppressed people who retaliate are up against the privileged and powerful. Fighting back often places them outside the system. But what happens when the suppressors’ tools are turned on themselves? Can a colonial education—the underhand offer of ‘a pencil for land’—be turned into an emancipatory counter movement? ‘Colonial mimicry’ describes a ...

History

How the War on Global Poverty Failed

As economic programs and policies shifted from the nation to the individual, United States development experts made political allies at home but failed the world

August 25, 2021 • by Joanne Meyerowitz

_____ In 1976, Michael Harrington traveled to India, Kenya, and Tanzania to bear witness to global poverty. A prolific author with a prophetic bent, Harrington had risen to fame in 1962 with The Other America, a book that stunned readers with its searing exposé of poverty in the United States, caught ...

History

Serendipity in the Archives

Or, a lost freedom story I found while looking for something else

August 25, 2021 • by Marcus Rediker

_____ During the early 1980s historian Peter Linebaugh and I decided to write a book about transatlantic currents of radicalism in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It was a project that eventually became The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Beacon Press and Verso ...

History

Remembering—and Forgetting—the Cuban Revolution

The history of Cubans’ mobilizations of, reckonings with, and debates over their past has not yet been fully told

August 24, 2021 • by Michael J. Bustamante

_____ There are two widely familiar versions of the Cuban story. According to the first, on January 1, 1959, a ragtag band of rebels swept down from the Sierra Maestra, delivering Cuba from the clutches of short-term dictatorship and longer neocolonial submission to the United States. In this view, the “triumph” of ...

Remembering—and Forgetting—the Cuban Revolution

History

Accidents of History?

There’s a reason why some disruptions can alter societies for the worse—and others don’t

August 4, 2021 • by David Potter

_____ Historical comparisons have been in the news recently. There was the revelation that Mark Milley, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff feared former president Trump was looking for a “Reichstag moment” to launch a coup. And how about the revelation that Vladimir Putin’s support for Trump’s candidacy, on ...

History

Politicians Should Get the History Right—Particularly Their Own History

If Democrats want to be trustworthy they must account for, not hide, how they have changed over time

July 14, 2021 • by Janet Golden and Richard Harris

_____ The Democratic Party’s successful struggle to reject its ugly history of racism and sexism is a source of pride, and justifiably so. So you can imagine how gobsmacked we were upon reading the official history of the national Democratic Party on its own website. Such distortion and historical misrepresentations! According to ...

History

I Read Mein Kampf So That You Don’t Have To

Four aspects of Hitler’s manifesto that matter for us today

June 22, 2021 • by Erich Christiansen

_____ During Donald Trump’s racially charged 2016 presidential campaign, many people started wondering to what extent Trump and his followers could be compared with Hitler and the ideology of the National Socialist movement that he led. One place to start to answer that question would be by reading Mein Kampf, (“My ...

I Read <em>Mein Kampf</em> So That You Don’t Have To

Democracy

Confederate Monuments Are Not History

Like the contemporary war on “critical race theory,” these statues of the defeated prop up white supremacy in the name of a false past

June 15, 2021 • by Claire Potter and Karen L. Cox

_____ It seemed as though monuments were suddenly in the news during Donald Trump’s presidency, but they have always been controversial. Monuments to the Confederacy were contested by African American citizens as soon as they appeared after 1865. Black citizens understood these monuments for what they were: a rallying point for ...

Economy

It’s Time to Ask New Questions About Boycotts

Named after an obscure English estate agent, a tactic that harnesses consumer power to make political change has had many incarnations

May 18, 2021 • by Claire Potter

_____ In 1880, the harvest in County Mayo, Ireland, was so poor that it seemed unlikely that the tenant farmers on lands held by English absentee landowner Lord Erne would be able to pay their rents. Graciously (he thought), Erne offered them a ten percent reduction. Energized by a fairness campaign ...

Activism

Taking on the Coors Brewing Company—and the Conservative Family Behind It

Consumer activists taking on the companies that support former President Donald Trump can learn from the boycott that never ended

May 18, 2021 • by Allyson P. Brantley

_____ Well into the 1990s, the energetic, septuagenarian gay organizer Morris Kight vehemently opposed any suggestion that the Coors beer boycott, first launched in the late 1950s by unionized brewery workers and later taken up by Chicano, Black, and LGBT activists, was over. For nearly four decades, Kight and other activists ...

Taking on the Coors Brewing Company—and the Conservative Family Behind It

History

The Paris Commune—Myth Made Material

As George Sorel explained, myths “provide an intelligible exposition of the passing of principles into action”

May 18, 2021 • by Mitchell Abidor

_____ Revolutions are materialist events in their essence. The explosive outgrowth of specific circumstances in specific places at specific times, the product of a specific history and a specific society, they are also, paradoxically, the bearers and result of what the philosopher Georges Sorel in his Reflections on Violence called “myths.” ...

History

The US Olympic Team with No Results

A boycott ended hundreds of gold medal dreams in 1980—to what purpose?

May 18, 2021 • by Anita L. DeFrantz

_____ Boycotts have many virtues. They impose financial and social penalties for official behavior that cannot otherwise be changed. Boycotts can not only be successful, they can be turning points in history. Without a doubt, the most important American boycott of the 20th century was initiated by Mrs. Rosa Parks, who, ...

History

A Pencil For Your Land

Ngũgĩ and Achebe on colonial public school

How the War on Global Poverty Failed

As economic programs and policies shifted from the nation to the individual, United States development experts made political allies at home but failed the world

Serendipity in the Archives

Or, a lost freedom story I found while looking for something else

Remembering—and Forgetting—the Cuban Revolution

The history of Cubans’ mobilizations of, reckonings with, and debates over their past has not yet been fully told

Accidents of History?

There’s a reason why some disruptions can alter societies for the worse—and others don’t

Politicians Should Get the History Right—Particularly Their Own History

If Democrats want to be trustworthy they must account for, not hide, how they have changed over time

I Read Mein Kampf So That You Don’t Have To

Four aspects of Hitler’s manifesto that matter for us today

Confederate Monuments Are Not History

Like the contemporary war on “critical race theory,” these statues of the defeated prop up white supremacy in the name of a false past

It’s Time to Ask New Questions About Boycotts

Named after an obscure English estate agent, a tactic that harnesses consumer power to make political change has had many incarnations

Taking on the Coors Brewing Company—and the Conservative Family Behind It

Consumer activists taking on the companies that support former President Donald Trump can learn from the boycott that never ended

The Paris Commune—Myth Made Material

As George Sorel explained, myths “provide an intelligible exposition of the passing of principles into action”

The US Olympic Team with No Results

A boycott ended hundreds of gold medal dreams in 1980—to what purpose?

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