Subjects Archives: History

Tecumseh was killed at the Battle of the Thames in 1813. His dream of an Indigenous confederacy largely died with him. Yet his appreciation of the moment and the possibilities for transformation lived on and should give us all pause.

A brief but spectacular achievement, the New Deal’s Federal Theatre Project (FTP) (1936-1939) provided jobs for some 13,000 destitute people at its height and created and produced 63,600 performances of 1,200 major theatrical works.

We face many big challenges. And we will need strong, bold policies to meaningfully address them. Solving our child-care crisis is one of those challenges, and a study of World War II government efforts to ensure accessible and affordable high-quality child care points the way to the kind of bold action we need. 

Three Texan authors build on a long tradition of dissent from patriotic accounts of Texas history in a new book on the racism baked into our story of the Alamo.

CounterSpin interview with Joseph Torres on media and the Tulsa massacre.

Surrounded by assasination plots and having been deceived from all sides, Louverture “was extremely reluctant to communicate his intentions even to his leading military officers, or to share power with them in any meaningful way.”

Cuba, the first Latin America country to develop its own COVID-19 vaccines, presently is short of syringes for immunizing its population against the virus. It’s not feasible for Cuba to make its own syringes. The U.S. blockade prevents Cuba from importing them from abroad.

A Catholic Church-run residential school for indigenous children was an extermination camp. It operated until 1978.

In celebration of the 150th anniversary of the Paris Commune.

Watch our release of documentary short The Rifleman, which examines how NRA head Harlon Carter fused gun rights, immigration enforcement, and white supremacy. Then read an interview with filmmaker Sierra Pettengill and historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz.

In 1898, upwardly mobile Blacks in Wilmington, NC were terrorized and slaughtered in a violent insurrection that set the stage for Jim Crow–and the next 123 years. Hardly anyone really knows about it.

In this feature-length documentary, Anthony Wilks traces the connections between the events of Hobsbawm’s life and the history he told.

How England’s government-licensed pirates stole the Newfoundland fishery from Europe’s largest feudal empire.

It all began as the sun rose over the districts of Montmartre and Belleville on 18 March 1871. Army soldiers began seizing nearly 250 cannon that had been placed in these radical, working-class areas by the National Guard, a popular Parisian militia. The soldiers had been sent by the head of the new republican government, Adolphe Thiers.

There is a wall at the Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris, known as “Le Mur des Fédérés”. It was there that the last fighters of the Paris Commune were shot in May 1871, by Versailles troops.

Remarks at the Cold War Truth Commission

The contemporary political economy of the People’s Republic of China, the nature of the Chinese system, has been the subject of much discussion and debate in mainstream academic, media, and political circles, as well as on the left. Yet one can only make sense of contemporary China with a clear understanding of the country’s economic history.

Without any training, Wood’s job was to infiltrate civil rights organizations and encourage leaders and members to commit felonious acts. He was also tasked with ensuring that Malcolm X’s security detail was arrested days prior to the assassination, guaranteeing Malcolm X didn’t have door security while at the Audubon Ballroom.

The link between the 1793 yellow fever epidemic and the coronavirus.

Money on the Left is joined by Julia McClure, lecturer in Late Medieval & Early Modern Global History at the University of Glasgow. McClure’s 2017 book, The Franciscan Invention of the World, draws compelling and confounding conclusions about the role of the late Medieval Franciscans in shaping the modern capitalist and colonialist world. We talk with McClure […]