Rattling the Cages: Oral Histories of North American Political Prisoners
Edited by Josh Davidson and Eric King
The official story is that the United States has no political prisoners. The reality is that there are hundreds of people rounded up, placed behind bars, and kept there for inordinately long sentences because of their political beliefs and activities. A project of abolitionist Josh Davidson and political prisoner Eric King, this book is filled with the experience and wisdom of over thirty current and former North American political prisoners. It provides first-hand details of prison life and the political commitments that continue to lead prisoners into direct confrontation with state authorities and institutions. The people Josh Davidson has interviewed include former radicals and Black liberation militants from the sixties and seventies, current antifascists, nonviolent Catholic peace activists, Animal and Earth Liberation Front saboteurs, and more. Their stories are moving, often tragic, yet deeply inspiring.
Collectively, these people have spent hundreds of years behind bars, and their experiences speak directly to the cruelty and immorality of our prison and so-called criminal justice systems. Although their sentences and the conditions they have endured vary dramatically, this wide range of voices come together to embody what bell hooks called “a legacy of defiance.” It is this legacy—of tirelessly struggling to right today’s wrongs and create a better tomorrow—that the prison system tries, yet fails, to extinguish.
Royalties from book sales are split between the Anarchist Black Cross Federation’s Warchest, which provides financial support to currently imprisoned political prisoners, and the family of political prisoner Eric King.
Workers’ Tales: Socialist Fairy Tales, Fables, and Allegories from Great Britain
Edited by Michael Rosen
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, unique tales inspired by traditional literary forms appeared frequently in socialist-leaning British periodicals, such as the Clarion, Labour Leader, and Social Democrat. Based on familiar genres—the fairy tale, fable, allegory, parable, and moral tale—and penned by a range of lesser-known and celebrated authors, including Schalom Asch, Charles Allen Clarke, Frederick James Gould, and William Morris, these stories were meant to entertain readers of all ages—and some challenged the conventional values promoted in children’s literature for the middle class. In Workers’ Tales, acclaimed critic and author Michael Rosen brings together more than forty of the best and most enduring examples of these stories in one beautiful volume.
Throughout, the tales in this collection exemplify themes and ideas related to work and the class system, sometimes in wish-fulfilling ways. In “Tom Hickathrift,” a little, poor person gets the better of a gigantic, wealthy one. In “The Man Without a Heart,” a man learns about the value of basic labor after testing out more privileged lives. And in “The Political Economist and the Flowers,” two contrasting gardeners highlight the cold heart of Darwinian competition. Rosen’s informative introduction describes how such tales advocated for contemporary progressive causes and countered the dominant celebration of Britain’s imperial values. The book includes archival illustrations, biographical notes about the writers, and details about the periodicals where the tales first appeared.
Provocative and enlightening, Workers’ Tales presents voices of resistance that are more relevant than ever before.
Tales for Little Rebels: A Collection of Radical Children’s Literature
Edited by Julia L. Mickenberg and Philip Nel
Radical leftist stories…for children
In 1912, a revolutionary chick cries, “Strike down the wall!” and liberates itself from the “egg state.” In 1940, ostriches pull their heads out of the sand and unite to fight fascism. In 1972, Baby X grows up without a gender and is happy about it.
Rather than teaching children to obey authority, to conform, or to seek redemption through prayer, twentieth-century leftists encouraged children to question the authority of those in power. Tales for Little Rebels collects forty-three mostly out-of-print stories, poems, comic strips, primers, and other texts for children that embody this radical tradition. These pieces reflect the concerns of twentieth-century leftist movements, like peace, civil rights, gender equality, environmental responsibility, and the dignity of labor. They also address the means of achieving these ideals, including taking collective action, developing critical thinking skills, and harnessing the liberating power of the imagination.
Some of the authors and illustrators are familiar, including Lucille Clifton, Syd Hoff, Langston Hughes, Walt Kelly, Norma Klein, Munro Leaf, Julius Lester, Eve Merriam, Charlotte Pomerantz, Carl Sandburg, and Dr. Seuss. Others are relatively unknown today, but their work deserves to be remembered. (Each of the pieces includes an introduction and a biographical sketch of the author.) From the anti-advertising message of Johnny Get Your Money’s Worth (and Jane Too)! (1938) to the entertaining lessons in ecology provided by The Day They Parachuted Cats on Borneo (1971), and Sandburg’s mockery of war in Rootabaga Pigeons (1923), these pieces will thrill readers intrigued by politics and history—and anyone with a love of children’s literature, no matter what age.
We Need More Parties
American democracy is broken, but partisanship alone is not to blame. Political scientist Lee Drutman places our two-party system instead at the center of the American democratic crisis. Of course, partisan conflict plays a role, forcing voters to choose between a party that they might dislike and another that is far worse. But the two party system creates this corrosive dynamic. And the results of this system are dire: more partisan division, low political legitimacy, and high citizen disaffection.
This is how democracies crumble. The way to save democracy, Drutman argues, is to create more and better political parties through electoral reform and fusion voting.
We Need More Parties features responses to Drutman from Working Families Party national director Maurice Mitchell, political scientists Daniel Schlozman & Sam Rosenfeld, political theorist and former candidate for Massachusetts governor Danielle Allen, and others.
The issue also includes essays on American democracy and the question of political legitimacy: Project 2025 and abuses of executive power, the anointing of J. D. Vance and the liberal embrace of “reasonable conservatives”, the politics of grief in rural America, and more.
Contributors: Tabatha Abu El-Haj, Danielle Allen, Deepak Bhargava, Elizabeth Catte, Kevin Donovan, Lee Drutman, James Goodwin, Arianna Jiménez, Josh Lerner, Cerin Lindgrensavage, Bob Master, Maurice Mitchell, Joel Rogers, Sam Rosenfeld, Daniel Schlozman, Doran Schrantz, Ian Shapiro, Honora Spicer, Sunaura Taylor, Grant Tudor, Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow, and David Walsh
We Refuse: A Forceful History of Black Resistance
By Kellie Carter Jackson
Black resistance to white supremacy is often reduced to a simple binary, between Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s nonviolence and Malcolm X’s “by any means necessary.” In We Refuse, historian Kellie Carter Jackson urges us to move past this false choice, offering an unflinching examination of the breadth of Black responses to white oppression, particularly those pioneered by Black women.
The dismissal of “Black violence” as an illegitimate form of resistance is itself a manifestation of white supremacy, a distraction from the insidious, unrelenting violence of structural racism. Force—from work stoppages and property destruction to armed revolt—has played a pivotal part in securing freedom and justice for Black people since the days of the American and Haitian Revolutions. But violence is only one tool among many. Carter Jackson examines other, no less vital tactics that have shaped the Black struggle, from the restorative power of finding joy in the face of suffering to the quiet strength of simply walking away.
Clear-eyed, impassioned, and ultimately hopeful, We Refuse offers a fundamental corrective to the historical record, a love letter to Black resilience, and a path toward liberation.
Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent
By Eduardo Galeano
With its U.S. debut fifty years ago, this brilliant classic set the standard for historical scholarship on Latin America. Rather than charting the continent according to more traditional geographic or chronological delineations, Eduardo Galeano told the story of Latin America by uncovering the patterns of five centuries of exploitation. Thus he was concerned with gold and silver, cacao and cotton, rubber and coffee, fruit, hides and wool, petroleum, iron, nickel, manganese, copper, aluminum ore, nitrates, and tin. These are the veins which he traced through the body of the entire continent, up to the Rio Grande and throughout the Caribbean, and all the way to their open ends where to this day they empty continuously into the coffers of wealth in the United States and Europe.
Weaving fact and imagery into a rich tapestry, Galeano never faltered as he fused scientific analysis of an immense vault of historical material, with the impassioned perspective of plundered peoples. Readers in all manner of great historical, economic, political, and social writing have found in Open Veins of Latin America a singularly rigorous analytical achievement which never lost vigor, an overwhelming narrative that makes history speak, unforgettably.
War Against All Puerto Ricans: Revolution and terror in America’s Colony
By Nelson A. Denis
In 1950, after over fifty years of military occupation and colonial rule, the Nationalist Party of Puerto Rico staged an unsuccessful armed insurrection against the United States. Violence swept through the island: assassins were sent to kill President Harry Truman, gunfights roared in eight towns, police stations and post offices were burned down. In order to suppress this uprising, the US Army deployed thousands of troops and bombarded two towns, marking the first time in history that the US government bombed its own citizens.
Nelson A. Denis tells this powerful story through the controversial life of Pedro Albizu Campos, who served as the president of the Nationalist Party. A lawyer, chemical engineer, and the first Puerto Rican to graduate from Harvard Law School, Albizu Campos was imprisoned for twenty-five years and died under mysterious circumstances. By tracing his life and death, Denis shows how the journey of Albizu Campos is part of a larger story of Puerto Rico and US colonialism.
Through oral histories, personal interviews, eyewitness accounts, congressional testimony, and recently declassified FBI files, War Against All Puerto Ricans tells the story of a forgotten revolution and its context in Puerto Rico’s history, from the US invasion in 1898 to the modern-day struggle for self-determination. Denis provides an unflinching account of the gunfights, prison riots, political intrigue, FBI and CIA covert activity, and mass hysteria that accompanied this tumultuous period in Puerto Rican history.
Disrupting Colonial Pedagogies: Theories and Transgressions
Edited by Jillian Ford and Natalia E. Jaramillo
Jillian Ford and Nathalia E. Jaramillo edit a collection of writings by women that examine womanist worldviews in philosophy, theory, curriculum, public health, and education. Drawing on thinkers like bell hooks and Cynthia Dillard, the essayists challenge the colonizing hegemonies that raise and sustain patriarchal and male-centered systems of teaching and learning. Part One examines how womanist theorizing and creative activity offer a space to study the impact of conquest and colonization on the Black female body and spirit. In Part Two, the contributors look at ways of using text, philosophy, and research methodologies to challenge colonizing and colonial definitions of womanhood, enlightenment, and well-being. The essays in Part Three undo the colonial pedagogical project and share the insights they have gained by freeing themselves from its chokehold.
Powerful and interdisciplinary, Disrupting Colonial Pedagogies challenges colonialism and its influence on education to advance freer and more just forms of knowledge making.
The Zapatista Experience: Rebellion, Resistance, and Autonomy
By Jéorme Baschet
An exploration of the Zapatista project, from its conception to the present.
On the thirtieth anniversary of the Mayan Indigenous uprising in Chiapas, The Zapatista Experience reconstructs the trajectory of the Zapatista struggle over the last three decades, both in its concrete achievements and in its contributions to the renewal of critical and antisystemic thinking. The Zapatista rebellion has become a reference and source of inspiration for many struggles around the world due to its major contribution in reformulating a credible and desirable path to emancipation, a path that broke with previously dominant conceptions: state-centric, productivist, Eurocentric, modernist, and patriarchal. Baschet demonstrates how the Zapatistas have succeeded in materializing, on a massive scale, the concrete experience of another way of living, a forerunner of possible emerging worlds.
The autonomous rebel territories of Chiapas are among the most developed and radical of the “real utopias” that exist in the world today, exceptional in their experiments in self-governance and anti-State political form, argues Jérôme Baschet. The Zapatista Experience orients readers in the profusion of Zapatista writings concerning, for example, the elaboration of a different understanding of politics, the Zapatistas’ planetary conjunctural analysis of capitalism as a total war against humanity, their conception of Indigeneity that breaks with both modernist individualism and identity politics, and their notion of time and history. All this in clear opposition to neoliberal capitalism.
LGBTQ Fiction and Poetry From Appalachia
Edited by Jeff Mann and Julia Watts
This collection, the first of its kind, gathers original and previously published fiction and poetry from lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer authors from Appalachia. Like much Appalachian literature, these works are pervaded with an attachment to family and the mountain landscape, yet balancing queer and Appalachian identities is an undertaking fraught with conflict. This collection confronts the problematic and complex intersections of place, family, sexuality, gender, and religion with which LGBTQ Appalachians often grapple.
With works by established writers such as Dorothy Allison, Silas House, Ann Pancake, Fenton Johnson, and Nickole Brown and emerging writers such as Savannah Sipple, Rahul Mehta, Mesha Maren, and Jonathan Corcoran, this collection celebrates a literary canon made up of writers who give voice to what it means to be Appalachian and LGBTQ.