Combining American historian Howard Zinn’s bestselling A People’s History of the United States and his autobiography You Can’t be Neutral on a Moving Train, A People’s History of American Empire is an inspirational “history from below” in comic form.
Starting with 9/11, the book takes the form of an extended lecture from Zinn, focusing on lesser-known episodes from American history, including the invasion of the Philippines in 1898 (where an early form of waterboarding was used during…
This timely British Library exhibition and accompanying book reflect the civil liberties debate moving into the mainstream and allow an important opportunity to reflect on the history of the struggle and to value what has been achieved so far.
On the one hand it emphasises the importance of codifying rights on paper (laws, manifestos etc…) and the power of this in sustaining ideas over time. It starts with the Magna Carta, the most significant provision of which was brought into…
This vast history spans the late 19th and early 20th centuries, charting not only the life of Edward Carpenter, but also the early development of today’s political and social movements. But at its heart is Carpenter’s struggle with legitimising homosexuality, both in his own life and as an integral part of a new way of living.
While Carpenter’s commitments to the labour movement, democracy and social transformation led to his involvement in adult education, the trade union movement…
Between May and December of 1961 nearly 60 Freedom Rides took place across the southern states of America. The Riders came from a variety of backgrounds and crossed age, gender, race, geographical, professional, religious and political boundaries.
Their aim was to challenge in a nonviolent way the state laws which segregated blacks and whites in the transport systems of the southern states. Riders travelled side by side on interstate buses, defied segregation laws in the public…
As a physicist myself (though of an altogether lowlier and grubbier variety), Oppenheimer’s story has always interested me.
How did a left-leaning, New York Jewish intellectual end up leading the Manhattan Project (the Second World War effort to develop the first nuclear weapons at Los Alamos in New Mexico), only to be crushed by the political system that he had served so well, in a much-publicised 1954 hearing which ended up withdrawing his security clearance? This book tells the…
Rarely is involvement with the military associated with nonviolence training and the ideals of Dr. Martin Luther King. However, as Peace News recently reported, this is the case in Dimona, Israel, where the African Hebrew Israelites of Jerusalem are not only sending their youth to fight in the Israeli Defense Force but also running the Dr. Martin Luther King/SCLC-Ben Ammi Institute for a New Humanity.
Brother Gamariyahu, the interim director at the Institute, confirmed to Peace News…
The events of May ’68 began in the universities. At Nanterre (just outside Paris) and the Sorbonne, students had become increasingly vocal against the US war in Vietnam. When police force was used to stamp out these early protests, more protests and strikes began to form.
By early May, courses at both the Sorbonne and Nanterre had been suspended. Students took their protests to the streets, and the Latin Quarter of Paris became the epicentre of clashes between students and police.…
Abbie Hoffman
Abbie Hoffman, a co-founder of the Youth International Party, or YIPPIES, led the October 1967 attempt by over 50,000 people to levitate the Pentagon using psychic energy. In 1968, he was one of the leaders of anti-war protests at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, which led to his prosecution for conspiracy to cause riots as one of the Chicago Eight (he was sentenced to five years in prison, but the sentence was overturned on appeal). After a period…
The Easter 1968 issue of Peace News had the following content... Obituary of Martin Luther King. A translation by Ronald Sampson of Leo Tolstoy’s Waging Peace Against Our Governments. Stan Scott’s review of Wilhelm Reich’s The Function Of The Orgasm. Bernard Power-Canavan’s powerful cartoon “one dollar” and John Arden’s “Personal Column” which reminds us “The best wheeze ever pulled was the ‘Spies For Peace’ over that RSG [Regional Seat of Government] ... 1963 ...…
Whisper & Shout, described as a “new irregular and guerrilla publication” aiming to “print poems and features of guts and sensitivity”, edited by Dennis Gould and published in February 1968:
I disrespect Governors and Government, Lawmakers and Law. I respect conscience and direct nonviolent actions. Disobedience and Love are two gentle but fierce commandments of anarchists and pacifists involved in this trivial and consuming society. Disobedience and Love are two themes of poets…
Published four years ago, Mark Kurlansky’s 1968: the year that rocked the world is an engrossing and stimulating general history of a time “when significant segments of population all over the globe refused to be silent about the many things that were wrong with the world.”
Kurlansky, 20 years old in 1968 and heavily involved in the anti-Vietnam war protests in the US, uses an impressive range of primary and secondary sources, including interviews with key participants and illuminating…
Imagine travelling the world in your dreams, navigating your way through its war zones with a set of dream maps – maps with some of the traditions of Western cartography, indications of lines of longitude and latitude, perhaps the outlines of countries – as well as beautiful colours rising off the land.
Bomb after Bomb is an atlas of places the United States has bombed, stretching from 19th century Nicaragua to 21st century Iraq, using hypnotically beautiful paintings by US artist…
”We would hardly be notorious characters if they had left us alone in the streets of Chicago last year.”
So said Tom Hayden
Two figures towered over Black America in the 1960s. Martin Luther King Jr called for racial integration, for nonviolence, for love of the enemy. Malcolm X advocated racial separation, armed self-defence and self-love – black pride. Martin Luther King came out of the Black middle classes, the American South, the traditional Christian churches. Malcolm X came out of the Black underclass, the North, some new form of Islam. King spoke for reconciliation; Malcolm X for rage.
And yet, in…
