Most political biographers choose a subject whom they either admire or loathe. They then spend years attempting to understand what, for example, made Martin Luther King, Jr., an inspiring leader of the black freedom struggle or drove Stalin to order …
Love, Poverty, and War: Journeys and Essays by Christopher Hitchens Nation Books, 2004, 475 pp., $16.95 Since the attacks of September 11, 2001, an unsettling matter has roiled certain precincts of the left: Christopher Hitchens’s zealous support of the Bush …
Every work of history, according to Howard Zinn, is a political document. He titled his thick survey A People’s History so that no potential reader would wonder about his own point of view: “With all its limitations, it is a history …
This is a defining moment for the American left. As Michael Wreszin, a distinguished historian, is well aware, reform and radical movements always get transformed in the crucible of war. The Civil War turned abolitionists into militant Republicans, World War …
I love my country. I love its passionate and endlessly inventive culture, its remarkably diverse landscape, its agonizing and wonderful history. I particularly cherish its civic ideals-social equality, individual liberty, a populist democracy-and the unending struggle to put their laudable, …
It’s never a good idea to refight the last big war. But perhaps one can learn a lesson from it. The atmosphere of American politics since September 11 bears an uncomfortable resemblance to that of the cold war, particularly during …
If a presidential election indicates the health of the body politic, America’s civic condition may be hovering just this side of the intensive-care ward. Even by the low standard we’ve come to expect from the quadrennial circus, the 2000 contest …
Dr. Seuss Goes to War: The World War II Editorial Cartoons of Theodor Seuss Geisel ed. Richard H. Minear, introduction by Art Spiegelman The New Press, 1999, 272 pp., $25 Somehow, all the hypsters who compiled end-of-century, best-of-the-millennium lists neglected …
In 1980, I began to keep a file of letters from my father. I don’t remember exactly why I decided to preserve the letters, to treat them as historical documents and not just as his re¬sponses of and for the …
The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century by Michael Denning Verso, 1996 556 pp $25, cloth; $20, paper In 1950, Theodor Geisel (Dr. Seuss) published Yertle the Turtle. A brief summary of this illustrated story …
I thought it was only the corporate breed who cut to “the bottom line.” At any rate, Joel Rogers protests too much. The purpose of my comments on the New Party was not to bury what is clearly the wisest …
Seventy years ago, American elites knew how to enforce the two-party system. “In 1924,” Robert and Helen Lynd reported in their classic study, Middletown, “It was considered such ‘bad business’ to vote for the third party [the Progressives, who ran …
John Diggins has written an irritating but provocative book. First, the annoyances: He calls the work a history of the left in the United States but slights everyone but intellectuals. He says almost nothing about the labor movement, but devotes …
In Transit: The Transport Workers Union in New York City, 1933-1966 by Joshua B. Freeman Oxford University Press, 1989, 434 pp., $34.95 Working-Class Americanism: The Politics of Labor in a Textile City, 1914-1960 by Gary Gerstle Cambridge University Press, 345 …
