History

What sets Staten Island apart from the rest of New York City? The island’s identity has in part been defined in opposition to the city, its physical and cultural differences, and the perception of neglect by city government. It has long been whiter, wealthier, less populated, and more politically conservative. And despite many attempts over the years, Staten Island is not connected by the subway to any of the other four boroughs.

Kenneth M. Gold argues that the lack of a subway connection has deeply shaped Staten Island’s history and identity. He chronicles decades of recurrent efforts to build a rail link, using this history to explore the borough’s fraught relationship with New York City as a whole. The Forgotten Borough ranges from when Staten Island first contemplated joining the city in the 1890s to the opening of the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge in 1964, highlighting pivotal moments when the construction of a subway appeared possible. The economics and engineering of tunnel construction, the difficulty of uniting Staten Islanders around a single solution, competition from the other boroughs, and resistance from powerful corporations and public authorities all undermined a rapid transit connection. Gold demonstrates that the failure to establish a rail link during this period caused Staten Island to diverge culturally, demographically, and politically from the other four boroughs. Drawing on extensive archival research, The Forgotten Borough shows how transportation infrastructure and politics shed new light on urban history.

Mikhail Tomsky (1880-1936) was one of the most important and influential leaders of the early Soviet Union.

This first English-language biography of Tomsky reveals his central role in all the key developments in early Soviet history, including the stormy debates over the role of unions in the self-proclaimed workers’ state.

Charters Wynn’s compelling account illuminates how the charismatic Tomsky rose from an impoverished working-class background and years of tsarist prison and Siberian exile to become both a Politburo member and the head of the trade unions, where he helped shape Soviet domestic and foreign policy along generally moderate lines throughout the 1920s. His failed attempt to block Stalin’s catastrophic adoption of forced collectivization would tragically make Tomsky a prime target in the Great Purges.

In Cuba Was Different, Even Sandvik Underlid explores the views of Cuban authorities, official press, and Party members as they reflect back on the collapse of Soviet and Eastern European socialism. In so doing, he contributes to a better understanding as to why the Cuban system—often associated with Fidel Castro leadership—did not itself collapse. Despite the loss of its most important allies, key ideological referents, and even most of its foreign trade, Cuba did not embrace capitalism.

The author critically examines and analyzes the collapse of the USSR and Eastern Europe as reported in the Cuban Communist Party newspaper Granma, both as they unfolded and subsequently through the lens of additional interviews with individual Party members. This focus on Cuba's Communist Party provides new perspectives on how these events were seen from Cuba and on the notable resilience of many party members.

The rise of capitalism to global dominance is still largely associated – by both laypeople and Marxist historians – with the industrial capitalism that made its decisive breakthrough in 18th century Britain. Jairus Banaji’s new work reaches back centuries and traverses vast distances to argue that this leap was preceded by a long era of distinct “commercial capitalism”, which reorganised labor and production on a world scale to a degree hitherto rarely appreciated.

Rather than a picture centred solely on Europe, we enter a diverse and vibrant world. Banaji reveals the cantons of Muslim merchants trading in Guangzhou since the eighth century, the 3,000 European traders recorded in Alexandria in 1216, the Genoese, Venetians and Spanish Jews battling for commercial dominance of Constantinople and later Istanbul. We are left with a rich and global portrait of a world constantly in motion, tied together and increasingly dominated by a pre-industrial capitalism. The rise of Europe to world domination, in this view, has nothing to do with any unique genius, but rather a distinct fusion of commercial capitalism with state power.

In 1934, Joseph Stalin enacted sodomy laws, unleashing a wave of brutal detentions of homosexual men in large Soviet cities. Rustam Alexander recounts the compelling stories of people whose lives were directly affected by those laws, including a naïve Scottish journalist based in Moscow who dared to write to Stalin in an attempt to save his lover from prosecution, and a homosexual theatre student who came to Moscow in pursuit of a career amid Stalin’s harsh repressions and mass arrests. We also meet a fearless doctor in Siberia who provided medical treatment for gay men at his own peril, and a much-loved Soviet singer who hid his homosexuality from the secret police.

Each vignette helps paint the hitherto unknown picture of how Soviet oppression of gay people originated and was perpetuated from Stalin’s rule until the demise of the USSR. This book comes at a time when homophobia is again rearing its ugly head under Putin’s rule.

In Gender and Biopolitics, Pınar Sarıgöl sheds new light on the life spheres of the woman as a means of examining neoliberal Islamic thinking about individuals and populations. Sarıgöl's exploration of the governmental rationality of post-2002 Turkey's Islamic neoliberalism is especially informed by Michel Foucault's critical perspective. The tenets and merits of Islamic neoliberalism bring moral and religious practices into the discussion regarding 'how' the social order should be in general, and 'how' the ideal woman should be in particular. Discussions of Islam and neoliberalism are here productively undertaken in concert, in part because Islam takes society as a social body in which hierarchies and roles are divinely normalised. This book uniquely brings this point to the fore and draws attention to the interplay between the rational and moral values constituting Islamic neoliberal female subjects.

What sets Staten Island apart from the rest of New York City? The island’s identity has in part been defined in opposition to the city, its physical and cultural differences, and the perception of neglect by city government. It has long been whiter, wealthier, less populated, and more politically conservative. And despite many attempts over the years, Staten Island is not connected by the subway to any of the other four boroughs.

Kenneth M. Gold argues that the lack of a subway connection has deeply shaped Staten Island’s history and identity. He chronicles decades of recurrent efforts to build a rail link, using this history to explore the borough’s fraught relationship with New York City as a whole. The Forgotten Borough ranges from when Staten Island first contemplated joining the city in the 1890s to the opening of the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge in 1964, highlighting pivotal moments when the construction of a subway appeared possible. The economics and engineering of tunnel construction, the difficulty of uniting Staten Islanders around a single solution, competition from the other boroughs, and resistance from powerful corporations and public authorities all undermined a rapid transit connection. Gold demonstrates that the failure to establish a rail link during this period caused Staten Island to diverge culturally, demographically, and politically from the other four boroughs. Drawing on extensive archival research, The Forgotten Borough shows how transportation infrastructure and politics shed new light on urban history.

The Dialectical Meaning of Offshored Work analyzes how offshoring investments function as a platform for intercultural encounters among corporate actors and local populations of hosting communities. The book synthesizes ethnographic research, media reviews, and policy analysis to examine how localized forms of offshoring production occur in social, political and economic processes to highlight dilemmas connected to mobility of capital, modernization, social equality and capitalist expansion. The book delineates the complex interplay between Western neoliberalism and a transforming post-socialist Europe, to show the complex ways in which offshoring production infiltrates local communities. Analyzing issues of labor, work and employment, this book engages with current scholarship on critical management, sociology, anthropology, and East European studies.

Bryan D. Palmer reinterprets the history of labour and the left in the United States during the 1930s through a discussion of the emergence of Trotskyism in the most advanced capitalist country in the world. Focussing on James P. Cannon, the founder of American Trotskyism, Palmer builds on his previously published and award-winning book, James P. Cannon and the Origins of the American Revolutionary Left, 1890-1928, with a deeply-researched and elegantly-written study of Cannon and the Trotskyist movement in the United States from 1928-38.

Situating this dissident communist movement within the history of class struggle, both national and international, Palmer examines how Cannon and others fought to revive a combative trade unionism, thwart fascism and the drift to war, refuse Stalinism's many degenerations, and build a new Party and a new International—both of which would be dedicated to reviving and realizing the possibilities of revolutionary socialism. The result is a peerless study that provides a definitive account of the largest and most influential Trotskyist movement in the world in the 1930s, an effort whose results recasts established understandings of the more extensively-studied experience of United States working-class militancy and the place of the Comintern-affiliated Communist Party within it.

The African American experience since the 19th century has included the resettlement of people from slavery to freedom, agriculture to industry, South to North, and rural to urban centers. This book is a documentary history of this process over more than 200 years in Toledo, Ohio. There are four sections: the origin of the Black community, 1787 to 1900; the formation of community life, 1900 to 1950; community development and struggle, 1950 to 2000; and survival during deindustrialization, 2000 to 2016. The volume includes articles from the Toledo Blade and local Black press, excerpts of doctoral and masters theses, and other specialist and popular writings from and about Toledo itself.

This is the story of the decline and fall of an empire, a region devastated by war, and a world stage fundamentally transformed by the Russian Revolution. Bauer’s magisterial work — available in English for the first time in full — charts the evolution of three simultaneous, overlapping revolutionary waves: a national revolution for self-determination, which brought down imperial Austro-Hungary; a bourgeois revolution for parliamentary republics and universal suffrage; and a social revolution for workers’ control, factory councils, and industrial democracy.

The brief but crowning achievement of Red Vienna, alongside Bauer’s unique theorization of an “integral socialism” — an attempted synthesis of revolutionary communism and social democracy — is a vital part of the left’s intellectual and historical heritage. Today, as movements once again struggle with questions of reform or revolution, political strategy, and state power, this is a crucial resource. Bauer tells the story of the Austrian Revolution with all the immediacy of a central participant, and all the insight of a brilliant and original theorist.

Usable Pasts zeros in on two periods in the United States that saw the state increase its financial support for socially engaged works of culture. In the 1990s the political artworks by Suzanne lacy, Rick Lowe, and Martha Rosler helped usher in an era of social practice art, while in the 1930s saw the creation of the leftist Cultural Front and its proliferation of experiential theatre, modern dance, and photography. By analyzing these trends and their relationship to one another this book unpicks the mythic and material afterlives of the New Deal in American cultural politics, and in so doing writes a new history of social practice art in the United States.

From teenage mothers organising exhibitions that challenged welfare reform, to communist dance troupes choreographing their struggles as domestic workers, Usable Pasts addresses the aesthetics and politics of these attempts to transform society through art in relation to questions of state formation.

This set of essays offers new insights into the journalistic process and the pressures American front-line reporters experienced covering World War II. Transmitting stories through cable or couriers remained expensive and often required the cooperation of foreign governments and the American armed forces. Initially, reporters from a neutral America documented the early victories by Nazi Germany and the Soviet invasion of Finland. Not all journalists strove for objectivity. During her time reporting from Ireland, Helen Kirkpatrick remained a fierce critic of that country’s neutrality. Once the United States joined the fight after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, American journalists supported the struggle against the Axis powers, but this volume will show that reporters, even when members of the army sponsored newspaper, Stars and Stripes were not mere ciphers of the official line.

African American reporters Roi Ottley and Ollie Stewart worked to bolster the morale of Black GIs and undermined the institutional racism endemic to the American war effort. Women front-line reporters are given their due in this volume examining the struggles to overcome gender bias by describing triumphs of Thérèse Mabel Bonney, Iris Carpenter, Lee Carson, and Anne Stringer.

The line between public relations and journalism could be a fine one as reflected by the U.S. Marine Corps’ creating its own network of Marine correspondents who reported on the Pacific island campaigns and had their work published by American media outlets. Despite the pressures of censorship, the best American reporters strove for accuracy in reporting the facts even when dependent on official communiqués issued by the military. Many wartime reporters, even when covering major turning points, sought to embrace a reporting style that recorded the experiences of average soldiers. Often associated with Ernie Pyle and Bill Mauldin, the embrace of the human-interest story served as one of the enduring legacies of the conflict.

Despite the importance of American war reporting in shaping perceptions of the war on the home front as well as shaping the historical narrative of the conflict, this work underscores how there is more to learn. Readers will gain from this work a new appreciation of the contribution of American journalists in writing the first version of history of the global struggle against Nazi Germany, imperial Japan, and fascist Italy.

The photographs collected in this unique book provide a startling visual documentation of seminal revolutionary events, from the Paris Commune of 1871 through to a series of "Unfinished Revolutions", from May 1968 in France to the Zapatista uprising in the mid-1990s. The immediacy of the images tells the story of these struggles in a way that texts rarely can, with revolutions appearing as complex and messy events driven by the actions of real, breathing humans who make their own history. Commentary on the images is provided by leading historians Gilbert Achcar, Enzo Traverso, Janette Habel, and Pierre Rousset, and Michael Löwy. This edition includes a new afterword by the author.

Few figures in the history of the American Left can claim a more significant and yet contradictory legacy as Jay Lovestone.

Lovestone and his comrades briefly controlled, and then were dramatically expelled from, the Communist Party of America. The so-called “Lovestoneites” struck out on their own, forming a new Communist political organization with a unique analysis of American conditions and the international political situation—different in content, but similar in its development, to the Trotskyist “Left Opposition.” This book, the first in a six volume series examining the ideology of dissident Marxist movements in America, provides fundamental documents illuminating the political and foreign policy ideas of Lovestone’s “Communist Party Opposition,” which included within its ranks at various times such prominent activists as Benjamin Gitlow, Bertram D. Wolfe, Will Herberg, Charles S. Zimmerman, Louis C. Fraina (Lewis Corey), and Ellen Dawson.  

By assembling this collection and providing commentary on these little known documents and articles from the Lovestone group, Le Blanc and Davenport have rendered an invaluable service to historians and activists looking to better understand the political landscape of twentieth-century radicalism.

Fabio Luis Barbosa dos Santos delves into the history of South America to understand the rise and fall of the so-called 'progressive governments'. In the wake of mobilizations against neoliberalism in the 1990s, most South American countries elected presidents identified with political change. However, less than twenty years after Hugo Chávez's victory, this trend seems to be reversed. Lula 's tenure has ended and Bolsonaro's has begun. What happened? Supported by an extensive bibliography and hundreds of interviews, the author addresses the trajectory of each South American country, including those which did not elect progressives, in addition to Cuba. The various national examinations are enriched by an analysis of regional integration attempts, providing a detailed and necessary recent history of the subcontinent.
Originally published in Portuguese as Uma história da onda progressista sul-americana (1998-2016) by Elefante, São Paulo, 2018.

This set of essays offers new insights into the journalistic process and the pressures American front-line reporters experienced covering World War II. Transmitting stories through cable or couriers remained expensive and often required the cooperation of foreign governments and the American armed forces. Initially, reporters from a neutral America documented the early victories by Nazi Germany and the Soviet invasion of Finland. Not all journalists strove for objectivity. During her time reporting from Ireland, Helen Kirkpatrick remained a fierce critic of that country’s neutrality. Once the United States joined the fight after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, American journalists supported the struggle against the Axis powers, but this volume will show that reporters, even when members of the army sponsored newspaper, Stars and Stripes were not mere ciphers of the official line.

African American reporters Roi Ottley and Ollie Stewart worked to bolster the morale of Black GIs and undermined the institutional racism endemic to the American war effort. Women front-line reporters are given their due in this volume examining the struggles to overcome gender bias by describing triumphs of Thérèse Mabel Bonney, Iris Carpenter, Lee Carson, and Anne Stringer.

The line between public relations and journalism could be a fine one as reflected by the U.S. Marine Corps’ creating its own network of Marine correspondents who reported on the Pacific island campaigns and had their work published by American media outlets. Despite the pressures of censorship, the best American reporters strove for accuracy in reporting the facts even when dependent on official communiqués issued by the military. Many wartime reporters, even when covering major turning points, sought to embrace a reporting style that recorded the experiences of average soldiers. Often associated with Ernie Pyle and Bill Mauldin, the embrace of the human-interest story served as one of the enduring legacies of the conflict.

Despite the importance of American war reporting in shaping perceptions of the war on the home front as well as shaping the historical narrative of the conflict, this work underscores how there is more to learn. Readers will gain from this work a new appreciation of the contribution of American journalists in writing the first version of history of the global struggle against Nazi Germany, imperial Japan, and fascist Italy.