Shadow Ticket

Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Dep…

Between 1929 and 1941, the Communist Party organized an…

The A.I. Boom and the Spectre of 1929

As some financial leaders fret publicly about the stock market falling to earth, Andrew Ross Sorkin’s new book recounts the greatest crash of them all.

Against the day

Spanning the period between the Chicago World's Fair of…

The Groundings with My Brothers

Walter Rodney

Paper Trails | Cameron Blevins

The US Post and the Making of the American West

The Second Gold Rush — Oakland Public Library

The Second Gold Rush — Johnson, Marilynn S. — More than any event in the twentieth century World War II marked the coming of age of America&#39;s West Coast cities. Almost overnight, new war industries prompted mass urban migration and development, producing social, cultural, and political changes that would persist well beyond 1945. For the San Francisco Bay Area, Marilynn S. Johnson argues, World War II was to the twentieth century what the gold rush was to the nineteenth.<br />Focusing on Oakland, Richmond, and other shipyard boomtowns in the East Bay, The Second Gold Rush chronicles the defense buildup, labor migration from the South and Midwest, the development of federal migrant communities, and the social and racial conflicts that pitted newcomers against longtime Bay Area residents. Johnson follows this story into the postwar era, showing how struggles between conservative and liberal forces over employment, housing, and civil rights shaped the urban political landscape into the 1950s and beyond. Tracing the cultural legacy of war migration, she also explains how Southern religion and music became an integral part of Bay Area life.<br />Urban historians have paid surprisingly little attention to World War II and the social and cultural transformation of wartime cities. In The Second Gold Rush, Johnson places the human drama of the war at center stage, recreating the texture of daily life in the workplace, the home, and the community.<br/>&#34;At last, a close-in account of California during its moment of rebirth, World War II. . . . A book that helps us to understand California&#39;s past and also its present.&#34;--James N. Gregory, author of <i>American Exodus</i><br/>More than any event in the twentieth century, World War II marked the coming of age of America&#39;s West Coast cities. Almost overnight, new war industries prompted the mass urban migration and development that would trigger lasting social, cultural, and political changes. For the San Francisco Bay Area, argues Marilynn Johnson, the changes brought by World War II were as dramatic as those brought by the gold rush a century earlier.<br /><br />Focusing on Oakland, Richmond, and other East Bay shipyard boomtowns, Johnson chronicles the defense buildup, labor migration from the South and Midwest, housing issues, and social and racial conflicts that pitted newcomers against longtime Bay Area residents. She follows this story into the postwar era, when struggles over employment, housing, and civil rights shaped the urban political landscape for the 1950s and beyond. She also traces the cultural legacy of war migration and shows how Southern religion and music became an integral part of Bay Area culture.<br /><br />Johnson&#39;s sources are wide-ranging and include shipyard records, labor histories, police reports, and interviews. Her findings place the war&#39;s human drama at center stage and effectively recreate the texture of daily life in workplace, home, and community. Enriched by the photographs of Dorothea Lange and others, <i>The Second Gold Rush</i> makes an important contribution to twentieth-century urban studies as well as to California history.

Eye From the Edge — Oakland Public Library

Eye From the Edge — Llamas, Ruben, 1937-

What corporate thrillers tell us about the '90s economy

PLUS: Has Forum Brain crossed the gender divide?

The passenger

"Pass Christian, Mississippi, 1980: It is three in the morning when Bobby Western zips up the jacket of his wet suit and plunges from a Coast Guard tender into darkness. His dive light illuminates the sunken jet, nine bodies still buckled in their seats, hair floating, eyes devoid of speculation. Missing from the crash site are the pilot's flight bag, the plane's black box, and the tenth passenger. But how? A collateral witness to machinations that can only bring him harm, Western is shadowed in body and spirit--by men with badges; by the ghost of his father, an inventor of the bomb that melted glass and flesh in Hiroshima; and by his sister, the love and ruin of his soul."--Dust jacket flap

American Socialist: The Life and Legacy of Eugene V. Debs

Before Bernie Sanders, before Zohran Mamdani, America’s favorite socialist was Eugene Debs.In 1912, some 1,200 Socialists held elected office across the United States. Wisconsin had a Socialist congressman in Washington, and ministers in Oklahoma preached the gospel of “Christian socialism” at revival-style gatherings come summertime. The leader of this vibrant movement? One Eugene V. Debs—part working-class agitator, part radical prophet, a man who made it feel like being an American and a socialist was the most natural thing in the world. Even opponents would describe Debs as Christlike. Born in Indiana in 1855, he’d dropped out of school at fourteen to work on the railroad. Elected to the state legislature in his twenties, he’d seemed a rising star in the Democratic Party: an optimistic moderate who urged respectability and compromise. But this was the Gilded Age: an era of corporate tycoons and outrageous sums of money in politics, of grueling hours and few rights for workers (if any). And when, in 1894, the president sent in thousands of troops to break a nationwide railroad strike Debs helped organize, Debs was radicalized. He emerged from a six-month prison sentence as a crusader, a stirring orator who would soon see all forms of unaccountable power—rich over poor, men over women, white over Black, colonizer over colonized—as poisonous to human freedom. Cofounding the Socialist Party of America, Debs would run for president five times and spend the rest of his life convincing ordinary workers that, together, they could create a political movement strong enough to transform the world. It wouldn’t be easy. He would suffer from chronic illness, lose friends and enrage allies, risk his marriage to a woman he loved, and receive a decade-long prison sentence for opposing World War I. And yet, countless Americans—not just in his lifetime, but in ours—would heed Debs’s righteous call for human solidarity. When Debs ran for president in 1920 from behind bars, he received almost a million votes. A rousing, poignant, intimately human tale of struggle against the odds, American Socialist is a stunning portrait of one man’s radicalization—and of the country he radicalized in turn. It’s a story that speaks powerfully to our own Gilded Age, when the very wealthy again rule America’s political and economic life and millions are looking for an alternative.

The Death and Life of Great American Cities

The Death and Life of Great American Cities is a 1961 book by writer and activist Jane Jacobs. The book is a critique of 1950s urban planning policy, which it holds responsible for the decline of many city neighborhoods in the United States. The book is Jacobs' best-known and most influential work.

Defusing the Depopulation Bomb

Book Review: "After the Spike" by Dean Spears and Michael Geruso

The Silver Bridge Collapse - Neil Zurcher

It was a Christmastime nightmare. The 1,750-foot-long Silver Bridge soared 102 feet above the Ohio river. On Dec. 15, 1967, it was bumper-to-bumper traffic as cars and trucks hurried home from work or a day of Christmas shopping. Then, at about 5 p.m., the unthinkable happened.