In his seminal 1995 text, How the Irish Became White, Noel Ignatiev at one point asks what the stakes of whiteness were: “It did not mean that they all became rich, or even ‘middle-class’ (however that is defined); to this day there are plenty of poor Irish…To Irish laborers, to become white meant at first that they could sell themselves piecemeal instead of being sold for life…” (More…)
Friedrich Kellner was born in Vaihingen an der Enz, in the German state of Württemburg in 1885, in the house of his father, a baker. At the age of 4, he relocated with his family to Mainz. (More…)
It is now nearly a decade since the death of Tony Judt. Judt’s work continues to present challenges, not least to those on the political left, of which he was a precise and unsparing (and occasionally irascible) critic. (More…)
The putative threat of the return of full-blown mid-20th-century fascism functions like a bad penny in the intellectual economy of modern Europe and North America. (More…)
At one point in 1943, British Home Secretary Herbert Morrison claimed that conceding self-government to the colonies would be the equivalent of giving a child of ten “a latch key, a bank account, and a shotgun.” (More…)
A Jewish army unconnected with Palestine is no concern of the Arabs in Palestine or of the Arab States. But will the Zionists be content with a Jewish army divorced from the Jewish National Home or Zion (Palestine)? (More…)
George Takei is one of the more remarkable figures in American public life. He owes his fame to his long-running role as Hikaru Sulu in the Star Trek universe. (More…)
Iran’s geopolitical position justifies its significance, even without the importance of oil. Iran sits at the conjunction of the Asian and Arab world and is athwart vital petroleum trade routes. (More…)
African slavery provided the foundation for modern Brazil, even more so than in the United States. Ten times as many enslaved Africans were trafficked to Brazil as to the United States. Today over just over half of Brazil’s population is either black or of African descent. (More…)
During the first two years of Soviet occupation, the Soviet press never admitted the involvement of Soviet troops in combat in Afghanistan. The little Soviet news coverage that did come out about Soviet military activity was not informative. (More…)
Susan Burton’s autobiography Becoming Ms. Burton: From Prison to Recovery to Leading the Fight for Incarcerated Women, written with Carl Lynn, provides a necessary counter-history, describing an early adult life in and out of prisons and her subsequent anti-incarceration work. (More…)
That evening in November, immediately after the promulgation of the “special laws,” several of us escaped arrest by taking refuge in a little villa in a suburb of Milan, recently rented by one of our comrades who was masquerading as a painter. (More…)