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RedditThis time the Bush Administration could not hide the dead bodies--or the walking wounded, whose abandonment by American society began not in the hurricane's wake but many years earlier.
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The Last Angry Man
Jeff Kisseloff: Eliot Asinof, blacklisted author of Eight Men Out, created a lifetime of work celebrating rebels and victims of injustice.
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City of Fear
Jon Wiener: A new book explores the historical ties between African-American and Japanese-American communities in Los Angeles.
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The Reminder-General
Stefan Collini: Tony Judt fears the twenty-first century has spawned a culture hell- bent on forgetting the past.
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Sweet Martin's Badass Song
Scott Saul: Several new books on Martin Luther King take a closer look at the rhetoric and economic politics of the civil rights icon.
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Dreaming Obama in North Carolina
Tom Hayden: Conversations with historian John Hope Franklin and civil rights heroes about race, memory and the possibility of change.
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Back Talk: Nicholson Baker
Christine Smallwood: In the debut of a new biweekly series, the author of Human Smoke discusses pacifism and World War II.
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Iraq's Ruined Library Soldiers On
R.H. Lossin: Five years ago this week, US troops stood by as mobs sacked Iraq's revered National Library and Archives. Despite little outside help, a cultural treasure soldiers on.
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Reconstruction Lessons
Eric Foner: Advocates of African-Americans and women achieve more by working together than by fighting.
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Battle Pieces
Eric Foner: In This Republic of Suffering, historian Drew Gilpin Faust strips from the Civil War any purpose beyond massive slaughter.
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Reading Lincoln in Pakistan
Eric Foner: Pervez Musharraf wraps himself in Lincoln's mantle, but no one is fooled.
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Lincoln's Antiwar Record
Eric Foner: Looking for a model lawmaker who called a President to account for launching a war on fabricated grounds? Consider Illinois Representative Abraham Lincoln's rebuke of James Polk.
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The President and the Prophet
Eric Foner: The Radical and the Republican traces the antislavery politics of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln.
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Rosa Parks: A Woman of Substance
Eric Foner: Frozen in memory as the simple woman who helped to bring down segregation, Rosa Parks was far more complex and formidable than the popular imagination makes her out to be . A fuller picture of her life should make us also remember the many unsung heroes and heroines who came before and after her.
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The American Political Tradition
Eric Foner: The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln expertly balances the roots of a political revolution: the impact of a few key leaders and the lives and aspirations of ordinary citizens engaging with the government for the first time.
But a better historical analogy, although not one that immediately springs to mind, may be the Lawrence strike of 1912, best-known for giving the labor movement the slogan "bread and roses." Thousands of poor immigrant workers walked off their jobs in the city's giant woollen mills to protest a wage reduction. Bill Haywood, leader of the Industrial Workers of the World, who had been invited in to help direct the strike, devised a plan to send the workers' children to live with sympathetic families in other cities for the duration.
By 1912 the Progressive Era was well under way, but the sight of the pale, emaciated children marching up Fifth Avenue transformed public opinion regarding the strike (leading the governor of Massachusetts to pressure the mill owners to accede to the workers' demands). More important, it broadened public support for efforts to uplift the poor and placed the question of poverty, and the federal government's obligation to combat it, front and center in the presidential campaign of 1912.
"I have worked in the slums of New York," wrote Margaret Sanger, "but I have never found children who were so uniformly ill-nourished, ill-fed and ill-clothed." Today, as in 1912, the shameful (and growing) presence of poverty has been thrust from invisibility onto the center stage of national discussion.
Let's hope the country finally awakens to the consequences of years of trickle-down economics, tax cuts for the rich, privatization of public responsibilities and the demonization of both government and the poor.
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