Most of us have been taught to think of Christopher Columbus as a single-minded, courageous visionary whose navigational skills led him to “discover” the Americas. In this beautifully written revisionist biography, accessible to people of all ages, Hans Koning gives us the true history of Columbus’ life and voyages. | more…
In 1969, Ferdinand Marcos won a second term as president, in one of the dirtiest campaigns in Philippine history. That same year, Edgar Jopson was elected president of the National Union of Students of the Philippines, in a campaign to keep the Communists out of the student movement. Thirteen years later Jopson was gunned down by the military during a raid on an underground safe house. He was by then one of the most wanted people in the country, with a price on his head, a leading Communist Party cadre and member of the urban underground. | more…
For all those interested in the relationship between the memories that permeate the built forms of the past and the pressures exerted by modern life, Harris Stone offers a richly illustrated examination of the seemingly irreconcilable opposition between action (hands-on) and scholarship (hands-off) — between those who want to preserve the past as a museum of dead relics and those who want to treat it as a part of contemporary life. | more…
Loosely based on the Haitian slave insurrection of 1791, Babouk is a biting account of colonialism at its peak. By using the imagination of the novelist to fill in the gaps in the historical record, Endore is able to show us how slavery felt to the slaves who experienced it. His novel is rare for its depiction of the shared history of the slaves and its attention to the variety of the slave experience. It provides the reader with a vivid history of Haiti and a compelling account of slavery and rebellion. | more…
This celebrated book provides entertaining, easy-to-use lesson plans for teaching labor history. “Most school teachers are drowned in paper, but here is one book I want to recommend to them. It is a way of getting American teenagers not just interested, but excited and passionate about their history—modern American labor history.” —Pete Seeger | more…
Poet and essayist Fawaz Turki begins his search for answers in the hallways of the 1983 Palestine National Council meeting in Algiers. He then recalls his family’s flight into Lebanon when he was eight, childhood in a refugee camp and the streets of Beirut, and years spent in Australia, France, and the United States in search of his identity, both personal and national. In describing this journey, Fawaz Turki also relates the stories of family, friends, and comrades, those who fought the battles and those who walked away from them. Together, these episodes comprise a panoramic history of a generation formed in exile, of a homeless people caught in the violent storm of Middle East politics. | more…
Sol Yurick writes radical novels, good ones, and loves to speculate on how culture gets inside people’s bones. In the early 1970s, Sol and I spend a lot of time musing over Monopoly, a game many leftists love to hate, others hate to love, and practically everybody plays. According to Shelly Berman, the comedian, “Monopoly evokes a unique emotion, the surge of thrill you get when you know you’ve wiped out a friend.” But what else is going on as we accumulate property and scheme how to beggar our neighbors? Are we simply expressing some atavistic urge for power, or tuning in, consciously or unconsciously, to the attitudes that are most highly prized in our business-oriented society? | more…
When Bernardo Vega arrived in New York from Puerto Rico in 1916, he was at the forefront of a migrant stream that was soon to become a flood. His memoirs—perceptive, lively, and politically aware—provide us with a unique and often humorous firsthand account of the life of an immigrant, as well as of the concerns and activities of the Puerto Rican community in New York in the period between the wars. | more…
In this lively and instructive memoir of his experience with the anti-Nazi underground in Italy and Yugoslavia during World War II, Basil Davidson has thrown needed light on a much-neglected part of European history. Sent to the area as a representative of the British Special Operations Executive (SOE), he is able to recount at first hand the intense determination of the revolutionary partisans, who hoped that their sacrifices would lead to a new society, and the equally determined policy of the Allies to suppress them. As the London Review of Books stated, “The true purpose of this marvelously original book is to remind us that [for the underground] the Second World War was above all a political, even a revolutionary, experience, in which liberation was not simply a matter of driving out the Germans but also involved a radical restructuring of whole societies… which had permitted the growth of appeasement, defeatism, and indigenous fascism. | more…
A powerful portrait of Maceo, committed anti-imperialist and heroic independence fighter. | more…
Analysis of Fanon’s major theories, with a special emphasis on his work on alienation. | more…
“As a socialist, Mr. Stone explains in terms that architects can understand and with examples which architects know from their own experiences, what it is to be dedicated to the Left in a world dedicated to the Right, to the Centre or to the self. He explains how producers of raw materials and products are able to influence public action in their interests rather than that of the community in the name of progress, renewal, slum clearance, and the American way-of-life… His drawings are a joy. It is clear that Mr. Stone is unsuccessful not in his terms but in ours because he has refused to be a corporate spear-carrier.” — The Canadian Architect | more…