History They Don’t Want You To Know

    [Editor’s Note: I ask this as a 65 year-old white guy: What the hell is wrong with so many white people? My cartoon above is a humorous expression of something dark and vile baked deep into the bones of white people; to one extent or another, all white people. Myself, I am ashamed to admit, included. There’s nothing funny about it. It is the great undone work of this nation and our individual lives. — Mark L. Taylor] BBC (6/20/16) The concept of there being “two Americas” is almost as old as the nation itself. From the outset…

[Editor’s Note: We also need to acknowledge that the United States has stolen children from their families during the slave trade and through the racist Government Indian School system, which was often assisted by churches. I would also add to Cole’s list of cruelty the American-backed Pinochet regime in Chile, which began with a CIA-backed coup on 9/11 … 1973. — Mark L. Taylor] By Juan Cole Informed Consent (6/18/18) Separating children from their parents, as Trump, Sessions and their myrmidons are doing, is monstrous and has been characteristic of the biggest dictators of the modern era. Here are a…

  NPR (6/16/18) The Advanced Placement World History course will no longer include precolonial civilizations. Scott Simon talks to Amanda DoAmaral, a former AP World History teacher, about why she opposes the change. Link to Story and -Minute Audio (Commoner Call cartoon by Mark L. Taylor, 2018. Open source and free for non-derivative use with link to www.thecommonercall.org )

  Zinn Education Project (5/28/18) In the midst of an unprecedented wave of teacher walkouts and strikes — in West Virginia, Oklahoma, Colorado, Arizona, Kentucky, and North Carolina — the Washington Education Association invited the Zinn Education Project to offer a labor history workshop for WEA members in Southwest Washington. “The Power in Our Hands: Integrating Labor History into Our Curriculum” was held on Saturday, May 19, 2018. High school teacher and Rethinking Schoolscontributor Ursula Wolfe-Rocca facilitated the workshop for elementary, middle, and high school teachers. She engaged attendees in role plays about local labor history (“The 1934 West Coast  Longshore…

    By Kim Phillips-Fein The New Republic (3/29/18) More than 100 years ago, at the height of the last Gilded Age, Congress passed its first law prohibiting corporations from spending money to influence election campaigns. From the start, the wealthy chafed against this limit, and some sought to test it in court. Alcohol manufacturers—terrified of high taxes and Prohibition—might not have seemed the ideal candidates to take on this fight. But they were nonetheless the first to challenge the law, contributing cash to candidates in state and federal races and then arguing that any effort to keep money out…

The manifesto remains a source of hope not to be dismissed. By Yanis Varoufakis The Guardian (4/20/18) No manifesto has better succeeded in doing all this than the one published in February 1848 at 46 Liverpool Street, London. Commissioned by English revolutionaries, The Communist Manifesto (or the Manifesto of the Communist Party, as it was first published) was authored by two young Germans – Karl Marx, a 29-year-old philosopher with a taste for epicurean hedonism and Hegelian rationality, and Friedrich Engels, a 28-year-old heir to a Manchester mill. As a work of political literature, the manifesto remains unsurpassed. Its most infamous lines,…

  Abby Martin (9/22/14) Abby Martin speaks with NYU media studies professor, Mark Crispin Miller, discussing the addition of 5 books to the Forbidden Bookshelf, a project aimed at making important literature that has gone out of circulation once again available to the public. The newest additions to the Forbidden Bookshelf include: 1. DuPont Dynasty: Behind the Nylon Curtain by Gerard Colby 2. Hidden History of the Korean War by I.F. Stone 3. Assassination on Embassy Row by Saul Landau and John Dinges 4. The Assassination of New York by Robert Fitch 5. The Polk Conspiracy by Kati Marton Access…