America’s First Red Scare
For many of its ideologues, a slaveholding Confederacy was meant to be a bulwark against radical politics of all stripes.
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Issue No. 18 | Summer 2015
Struggle and Progress
Let me give you a word of the philosophy of reform. The whole history of the progress of human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to her august claims have been born of earnest struggle. The conflict has been exciting, agitating, all-absorbing, and for the time being, putting all other tumults to silence. It must do this or it does nothing. If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing up the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters.
Killing Reconstruction
During Reconstruction, elites used racist appeals to silence calls for redistribution and worker empowerment.
Not Waiting for Deliverance
Even before the Thirteenth Amendment was ratified, enslaved women struggled for the passage of the Enlistment Act of 1865 and their own emancipation.
Our Forgotten Labor Revolution
After the Civil War, workers struggled to make wage labor go the way of chattel slavery.
Race to Nowhere
For over a century, black elites have pushed improved “race relations” instead of redistribution as the solution to inequality.
Struggle and Progress
Eric Foner on the abolitionists, Reconstruction, and winning “freedom” from the Right.
The Cinematic Lost Cause
Why have so many films dealing with the Civil War embraced the Confederate struggle?
The Douglass Option
Frederick Douglass believed there was an alternative. So should we.
The James Brown Theory of Black Liberation
We shouldn’t reduce historical narratives solely to questions of black agency. It’s bad history — and can lead to even worse politics.
The Second American Revolution
The Civil War inaugurated a titanic revolution that within years brought slavery to an end and broke the planter class.