Subjects Archives: History

An excellent history of the sixteenth-century radical Thomas Müntzer brings the radical Reformation and the dawn of the modern era into focus, finds Dominic Alexander.

It is not coincidental. It’s in the annals. The Mexican people did it once again as on many other occasions throughout history. It is true that Hernán Cortés was accompanied by a Malinche (last Sunday there was also another courting the past) but memory reminds us of Atotoztli, Tomiyahuatl, Eréndira and Tecuichpo, great women who forged the Aztec nation.

As a Black army of mercenaries from Kenya, Barbados, Jamaica, and elsewhere arrives to continue the West’s colonial project in Haiti, we remember the history of the 1802 mutiny of African soldiers at Dominica.

Archeology has always been a political science. Since its inception the field has attempted to trace our lineage as a species along the lines of identity, territory and culture. Though often portrayed as a discipline slightly closer to the hard sciences than historiography, it is much closer to its distant cousin in the social sciences than towards anything resembling an empirical practice.

It was May 10^th in Germany’s terrible year 1933, Hitler had been in power for hardly three months, when students and staff emptied the university libraries of forbidden books and threw them, an estimated 20,000 books by over a hundred authors, into the flames of a giant bonfire.… No books were burned this time in early May. But there were ironic parallels, some all too alarming!

This is an amazing history, one that should be on the list of every history class dealing with modern history, history of the British Empire, and further on to those studying economics, politics, and geopolitical strategies.

Hydropower has long been heralded as “clean,” “green” energy. Yet living in Akwesasne, just a few kilometers away from the Moses-Saunders Power Dam, it seems that almost every one of its approximately 13,000 residents is either sick or has a family member that is sick.

This article looks at Vygotsky’s relationship to the Russian Revolution and explores his key ideas about how we develop concepts and learn, as well as about the nature of imagination and play.

In this first of two extracts from Terina Hine’s new book, “A People’s History of Covid”, the impact of inequality and neoliberalism in the UK on the spread of Covid is outlined

The Reckoning is a magnificent conclusion to a quartet of books on New World slavery, explaining the role of slavery and its abolition in the rise of American power, finds Chris Bambery.

The Dialectics of Time and Revolutionary Struggle.

RON JACOBS points out that it wasn’t until anti-imperialist and anti-racist movements formed women’s liberation groups that the fundamental roots of oppression could be addressed.

Ruling ends formal discussion in official geological organization.

Commission chairs say organizers of ballot violated statutes and ignored scientific evidence.

When the U.S. began its aerial germ war bombing campaign over No. Korea & China in Winter 1952, China’s Foreign Affairs Minister publicly accused the U.S. of dropping infected insects in Northeast China.

The West’s fiction of “human rights” has been weaponized by neoliberals to rationalize naked imperialist interventions. But if human rights are to have any relevance for the oppressed, they must be “de-colonized” and given meaning by the oppressed themselves: a People(s)-Centered Human Rights (PCHR).

Anthropology, since its inception, has been an ideologically contested–discipline, and the same is true of both primatology and zoology when they have been used to explain human evolution.

On the centenary of Thompson’s birth, Dominic Alexander celebrates his monumental work, “The Making of the English Working Class”.

Providing a useful understanding of our past has never been more difficult. Schools at all levels have been attacked for teaching (or discussing) almost anything that disturbs the status quo or makes students think.

As the 100th anniversary of Lenin’s death approaches, here are ten books to help renew the Leninist tradition for the crises ahead, compiled by Dominic Alexander.