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There Were Lynchings in the North, Too

James Barron New York Times
An NYU project examines the history of lynching's after the Civil War, including one in New York State. Billie Holiday sang a disturbing ballad called “Strange Fruit” for the first time in 1939, referred to lynching's in the South, and also the North

This Week in People’s History, Mar 5–11

Portside
Engraved image of the 1770 Boston Massacre If This Be Treason (in 1774), War Is Such an Ugly Word (1919), U.S. Thumbs Nose at International Law (1984), International Women's Day! (1914), Joe McCarthy's Dam Cracks (1954), Whose Streets? Our Streets! (1969), Big Win for Miners' Health (1969)

books

Hollywood Is a Union Town, but the History Is Complicated

Steven Wishnia The Indypendent
The American movie industry has been one of the most consistently unionized sectors of the economy since the 1930s — but to achieve that, workers had to overcome “the iron fist of the moguls” and organized crime, says historian Gerald Horne

books

Staughton Lynd: The Perils of Sainthood

Paul Buhle Portside
Staughton Lynd seemed like a personal force almost more than a person within the antiwar movement of the 1960s. My Country Is the World largely and usefully recounts the controversies that came with his rise in the peace movement of the middle 1960s

A Good Life Rule for Leftists: Never Talk to the FBI

Michael Myerson Jacobin
Being a leftist — or worse, a child of leftists — in the mid-20th century meant constant harassment from the FBI. From my childhood in the 1940s and ’50s through the upheavals of the ’60s, I only told them one thing: take a hike.

We Are Long Overdue for a Paul Robeson Revival

Peter Dreier Los Angeles Review of Books
In the 1970s, Robeson’s admirers — boosted by the upsurge of black studies and black cultural projects, the waning of the Cold War — began to rehabilitate his reputation with various tributes, documentary films, books, concerts, exhibits, and a play
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