Subjects Archives: History

The long-awaited The Vietnam War documentary by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick has arrived. It is powerful and moving, disturbing, enlightening, and challenging. But it is not without its omissions and distortions.

Last October 8, 50 years after the murder of Che Guevara, thousands of people who vindicate his legacy of struggle arrived in La Higuera, Vallegrande, where the Argentine-Cuban guerrilla was captured and later assassinated.

A New York Times article, following the white supremacist demonstrations in Charlottesville, Virginia, and the murder of anti-racist activist Heather Heyer, described the growing calls to remove monuments that celebrate the Confederacy. The article went on to cite some who balk, however, when “the symbolism is far murkier, like Christopher Columbus.”

An exploration of Bernal’s contribution to the politicization of science and scientists, above all the development of the Social Relations of Science movement.

In only 39 years, the young man from the city of Rosario accomplished something not achieved by many who lived a century. He became part of the people’s history and remains so today.

This is an updated, re-edited version of my 2007 essay written for a Celebration of Ernesto Che Guevara’s life held in New York City in commemoration of the 40th anniversary of his execution, attended by 300 people. —Ike Nahem Che Lives! Che died defending no other interest, no other cause than the cause of the […]

Victor Dreke is a former colonel of Cuba’s Revolutionary Armed Forces who fought alongside Che Guevara during the Cuban revolution’s decisive battle of Santa Clara.

On Wednesday, the country came alive preparing for the numerous forums, debates, and artistic and musical exhibitions in memory of Che Guevara.

In 1620 the Mayflower sailed from Plymouth, UK and in 2020 the 400-year anniversary of the sailing is being commemorated, centred in Plymouth UK. Highly selective and sanitized education preparations have already started.

Vijay Prashad explains his resignation from the editorial board of Third World Quarterly after it published an apologia for colonialism.

On September 14, it will be exactly 150 years since the publication of Capital: Critique of Political Economy, the first volume of Karl Marx’s epochal Das Kapital. The historicity of the book can be gauged by the fact that this first of three bulky tomes was published by a Hamburg publisher two years after the American Civil War but well above a decade before the incandescent bulb was invented. Capital however, literally acted as the bulb that shone a light on many a way.

This article covers the first substantive Internet posting and analysis of a unique Cold War document, the “Report of the International Scientific Commission for the Investigation of the Facts Concerning Bacterial Warfare in Korea and China.”

More than half a century ago, E. P. Thompson pioneered a new approach to labor history in The Making of the English Working Class. Thompson was dismayed with the bourgeois idea that history is made by great men, and the occasional princess or queen, but also frustrated with socialist histories that replace statesmen and business moguls with wise, if not infallible, party leaders and union bosses allegedly executing the iron laws of history.

The Canadian state is historically based on the theft and occupation of indigenous lands and the genocide of their peoples. The state that resulted is thoroughly integrated within global imperialism.

This year marks the fiftieth anniversary of the outbreak of the “Naxalite” revolutionary peasant uprising in northern India, named for the locale in which it first appeared, Naxalbari. What follows is an interview with a prominent Bengali intellectual who recalls his youthful foray into the countryside to organize poor peasants.

Have we in the U.S. have forgotten what happened in Honduras? Or is that many of us believe falsehoods about that history brought to us by media like the New York Times?

It is a devastating fact that James Baldwin is our contemporary; so much so, that the matter of his relevance seems either pressing or redundant depending on to whom one speaks. Raoul Peck’s I Am Not Your Negro, a “cinematic séance” (The Guardian), is being taken as the completion of Baldwin’s unfinished Remember This House, […]

During their storied careers, Magdoff and Sweezy edited the journal Monthly Review, which Sweezy co-founded in 1949, and which still stands as the longest continuously published socialist magazine in the United States.

Would non-use at the end of a brutal total war have created a taboo against the use of nuclear weapons as strong as resulted from the demonstrated horror of their effects against the two Japanese cities? Perhaps not.

The book’s impact on economics, politics and current affairs has been formidable, and aspects of Marx’s thinking have permeated areas of scientific research as disparate as robotics and evolutionary theory.