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Read an excerpt from Hell’s Kitchen and the Battle for Urban Space on the Gotham Center's History Blotter

Read an excerpt from Hell’s Kitchen and the Battle for Urban Space on the Gotham Center's History Blotter

February 20, 2024

What does it mean to live in a "bad neighborhood"? How do urban dwellers themselves produce urban space as history, in the changing modes of perception, in the shifting conceptual ideas that are literally the result of the numerous encounters with the everyday physical paths, nodes, and routes. Here in urban laboratories like New York's Hells Kitchen, we see the actual creation of the Progressive Era reformer, forged in the encounter with the space of tenement life. We see the emergence of a new politics, of an urban working class aware of its role as object of study, performing the routine of urban "problem" by insisting that their collective voice be heard. We see the space itself being produced in everyday use, and altered by the demands of economy, of culture, of politics, spaces that then act themselves, framing the new conceptual ideas that would drive future restructurings.

NEW! A Freedom Budget for All Americans: Recapturing the Promise of the Civil Rights Movement in the Struggle for Economic Justice Today by Paul Le Blanc and Michael D. Yates

NEW! A Freedom Budget for All Americans: Recapturing the Promise of the Civil Rights Movement in the Struggle for Economic Justice Today by Paul Le Blanc and Michael D. Yates

February 20, 2024

Just in time for the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, Paul Le Blanc and Michael D. Yates explain the origins of the Freedom Budget, how it sought to achieve "freedom from want" for all people, and how it might be re-imagined for our current moment. Combining historical perspective with clear-sighted economic proposals, the authors make a concrete case for reviving the spirit of the Civil Rights Movement and building the society of economic security and democratic control envisioned by the movement's leaders—a struggle that continues to this day.

Hell’s Kitchen and the Battle for Urban Space reviewed in Antipode

Hell’s Kitchen and the Battle for Urban Space reviewed in Antipode

February 20, 2024

Despite recent efforts to efface its history through the practice of renaming, the area of mid-west Manhattan that real estate agents now call the Clinton Historic District (or even 'Clinton Heights') remains – to many existing residents and to the popular imagination at large – Hell's Kitchen. Just how and why this moniker and all that it conjures have stuck is part of the story that Joseph Varga tells in Hell's Kitchen and the Battle for Urban Space, a nuanced and theoretically-sophisticated history of the social relations and spatial imaginaries that produced this area in the turbulent decades from 1894 to 1914. Though this period of American urban history – the era of Progressive reform – has received considerable attention from historians, Varga adds a much-needed dimension to the discussion by engaging directly with critical spatial theory. The result is not just an eminently readable history of Hell's Kitchen, but a fascinating example of how 'taking space seriously' can alter our historical understandings and perspectives in powerful ways.

Paul Le Blanc discusses A Freedom Budget for All Americans with Scott McLemee for Inside Higher Ed

Paul Le Blanc discusses A Freedom Budget for All Americans with Scott McLemee for Inside Higher Ed

February 20, 2024

Three years after the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, a number of its core organizers projected a new stage of the struggle for equality -- expanding and deepening it, creating the economic and social foundations needed to realize Martin Luther King's dream. Their program, "A Freedom Budget for All Americans," was issued by the A. Philip Randolph Institute in fall 1966. In his foreword, King called the document "a moral commitment to the fundamental principles on which this nation was founded." Chances are you've never heard of it.

Lettuce Wars reviewed on Counterfire

Lettuce Wars reviewed on Counterfire

February 20, 2024

This political memoir of workers' struggles in the fields of California raises the key question of whether the 'American Way of Life was, and is, only possible because the intense, cruel exploitation of some sustains the privileged lives of others' (p.121). Neuburger's book is part political memoir and part political analysis of the struggle for rights in the 1970s in the vegetable and fruit fields of California, and is a valuable contribution to the history of American political and economic radicalism.

One Day in December reviewed in Green Left Weekly

One Day in December reviewed in Green Left Weekly

February 20, 2024

One Day in December shows that Sanchez's greatness was the greatness of thousands. Likewise, it recasts the other leaders in a similar light. Castro's leadership role is obvious, but he depended on Sanchez and her networks to operate. Che Guevara and Camilo Cienfuegos led famous guerrilla contingents, but they were dependent on the peasants who made up these columns, their guides, and the local underground networks that helped them establish new revolutionary structures as they liberated towns. This is the real strength of One Day in December ... a book that should be read for all those who want to truly understand the Cuban revolution.

NEW! Ruth First and Joe Slovo in the War against Apartheid by Alan Wieder; foreword by Nadine Gordimer

NEW! Ruth First and Joe Slovo in the War against Apartheid by Alan Wieder; foreword by Nadine Gordimer

February 20, 2024

Ruth First and Joe Slovo, husband and wife, were leaders of the war to end apartheid in South Africa. Communists, scholars, parents, and uncompromising militants, they were the perfect enemies for the white police state. Together they were swept up in the growing resistance to apartheid, and together they experienced repression and exile. Their contributions to the liberation struggle, as individuals and as a couple, are undeniable. This book, the first extended biography of Ruth First and Joe Slovo, is a remarkable account of one couple and the revolutionary moment in which they lived. Alan Wieder's heavily researched work draws on the usual primary and secondary sources but also an extensive oral history that he has collected over many years. By intertwining the documentary record with personal interviews, Wieder portrays the complexities and contradictions of this extraordinary couple and their efforts to navigate a time of great tension, upheaval, and revolutionary hope.

John Bellamy Foster at the Left Forum Closing Plenary [video]

John Bellamy Foster at the Left Forum Closing Plenary [video]

February 20, 2024

John Bellamy Foster, editor of Monthly Review and author, most recently, of The Endless Crisis (with Robert W. McChesney), gave an address at the closing plenary of the Left Forum on June 9, 2013, in New York City. He was joined by Alvaro Garcia Linera, Vice President of Bolivia; Catherine Mulder, John Jay College of Criminal Justice-CUNY and CUNY's Murphy Institute; and Tadzio Muller, political scientist, climate justice activist, and translator, Rosa Luxemburg Foundation.

Read an excerpt from Ruth First and Joe Slovo in the War against Apartheid on Truthdig

Read an excerpt from Ruth First and Joe Slovo in the War against Apartheid on Truthdig

February 20, 2024

RUTH FIRST IS BURIED in Llanguene Cemetery in a dusty Mozambican suburb. Her grave lies next to those of other members of the African National Congress who were killed by the apartheid government in a 1981 raid, referred to as the Matola Massacre, where South African soldiers in blackface committed cold-blooded murder. Ruth's killing was no less brutal: the South African regime sent a letter bomb that detonated in her hands and sent shrapnel into the bodies of her colleagues at Eduardo Mondlane University. Joe Slovo is one of two white South Africans that lie in rest at Avalon Cemetery in Soweto, one of Johannesburg's massive black townships. His funeral, a national event, took place before a crowd of over 40,000 people packed into Orlando Stadium, home of Soweto's premier soccer club, where he was eulogized by among others, the Chief Rabbi of South Africa, Cyril Harris.

Read another excerpt from Ruth First and Joe Slovo in the War against Apartheid on LINKS

Read another excerpt from Ruth First and Joe Slovo in the War against Apartheid on LINKS

February 20, 2024

JOE'S FIRST IMPRESSION of Ruth was that she and her intellectual friends at the University of the Witwatersrand were "just too big for their boots." It was 1946, Joe was just returning from the army and the Second World War, and Ruth was in the midst of her social science studies at the university. They were both engaged in political protests and actions through the Communist Party of South Africa,already committed militants and engaged intellectuals, each looking toward a life of struggle for justice and equality.

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