Subjects Archives: 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 […]

The U.S. share of the global economy has shrunk dramatically since 1960. On the other hand, China is on pace to surpass the U.S. in GOP terms in 2030. 

On 17 January 2021, we commemorate the 60th anniversary of the assassination of Patrice Lumumba (1925-1961).

Orphaned after their parents were executed for espionage, the story of the Rosenberg boys is one all Americans should know.

Along with a motley collection of wealthy swindlers and fraudsters, President Donald Trump on Dec. 22 pardoned four former Blackwater private contractors (mercenaries) convicted in the infamous Sept. 16, 2007, Nisour Square massacre in Baghdad.

In this episode we are joined by Christine Desan, Leo Goettlieb professor of law at Harvard Law School to discuss her excellent book, Making Money: Coin, Currency, and the Coming of Capitalism.

Dennis Broe compares and contrasts two images of John Brown in recent TV series. Image above: John Brown at his zaniest, in The Good Lord Bird 

The celebration of Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste reflects the continued priority of elite preferences over the needs and struggles of ordinary people.

Online and on social media, popular historians are helping young Chinese reframe the country’s leftist past in a more positive light.

“We do not tell the people: believe. We say: read,” a statement not made casually, but rather a public expression of a deep conviction, spoken by Fidel in 1961.

In January 1945, Mao Tse-tung sent a message to U.S. President Roosevelt asking to visit the U.S. and discuss future relationships with China. The message got blocked by a U.S. diplomat in China, and Roosevelt apparently did not receive it.

Engels’ study of The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845) is a pioneering work of urban political ecology and urban sociology, that offers a vivid and human portrayal of the horrors which accompanied the Industrial Revolution.

The 1857 Rebellion against British rule in Colonial India hasn’t always received the attention it deserves, despite being one of the most important uprisings of the 19th century. Pranav Jani argues it’s high time we changed that.

The coup followed an election that would have resulted in Morales’ fourth term as president, the results of which were questioned by the Organisation of American States or OAS (60% of whose funding comes from the U.S. government).

What is at stake when we talk about the economics of North American slavery? Over the last 75+ years it has been whether capitalism superseded slavery or whether capitalism and slavery were co-constituted, capitalism to some extent relying on slavery.

As the world continues to grapple with COVID-19, Maeve McGrath takes a look at how artists have depicted plagues and epidemics in times gone past.

2020 is the birthday year of Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, whom most of us know as Lenin. If still alive, he would be 150 years old.

In this episode, Money on the Left hosts speak with Rebecca Marchiel, Assistant Professor of History at University of Mississippi, about her important new book, After Redlining: The Urban Reinvestment Movement in the Era of Financial Deregulation (University of Chicago Press, 2020). After Redlining tells the story of the anti-racist urban reinvestment movement in early […]