History (3,541 posts)

In the 1920s, Republican Calvin Coolidge said that public libraries were “within the reach of almost everyone” and contained “the best books and authorities on any subject.” By using these institutions, he said, citizens could evaluate “current proposals for political improvement.” Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt took up that theme as the U.S. edged toward World War II. Above: President-elect Roosevelt stands with a Queens book bus in 1932.

Whether you’re eating, smoking or drinking it, cannabis is commonplace; in the U.S., more people use it on a daily or near-daily basis than any other intoxicating substance, including alcohol or cigarettes. But how far back does humanity’s relationship with cannabis stretch? In new research, archaeologists have dated the earliest known human use of cannabis to 2,800 years ago.

Harry Braverman’s arguments in his classic book Labor and Monopoly Capital presciently forecasted much of our present labor regime — and can help us move beyond it. Above: Assembly line workers polish body panels at a Ford Motor Company assembly plant in Minnesota, March 1935.

The Carlisle school cemetery in 1935. Since 2017, the remains of 58 children buried at Carlisle have been returned to their tribal communities, according to the Office of Army Cemeteries.

Figure 1. Edith Walton in the original FANY uniform, 1909.

Volume 35, Issue 6, November 2026, Page 1113-1130
.

Read the full article ›

Debs giving a speech during his 1908 campaign, the third of his five runs for president

Protesters flee for their lives after police opened fire on a peaceful crowd at the Sharpeville Massacre on 21 March 1960. © Ian Berry/Magnum Photos

The siblings were sent to Canada as part of the British Home Children child migration programme, which saw about 100,000 impoverished children from Britain sent to overseas colonies including Canada, between 1869 and the 1940s. Above: A group of girls waiting to board a ship to Canada as part of the British Home Children programme

Margaret Thatcher usually gets the credit (or the blame) for Britain’s neoliberal turn from the late 1970s. But it was her Labour predecessor James Callaghan who took the first key steps away from the social democratic reforms his party had carried out.

When Dolly Parton died recently, radio stations and music streamers filled our ears with her irresistible anthem, “9 to 5.” The song topped the music charts and was nominated for an Oscar. It transformed Parton, making her movie debut, into a global crossover star.

There’s an occasional white cross, or mossy, cracked headstones. But there are mostly no names on the burial markers for incarcerated children who died in government custody generations ago. And those are just the ones that are well known. According to a first-of-its-kind report released last week by Georgetown University’s Forgotten Children Initiative, there are 40 such sites across the country. They hold the remains of more than 1,000 deceased kids, and in some cases, babies.

Set in early twentieth-century New York, the book tells the extraordinary story of what happened when a catastrophic fire in Greenwich Village threw Adolph Ochs, the ambitious new publisher of the New York Times, and Rose Schneiderman, a defiant young labor organizer, into a momentous struggle over who should organize the city’s response: a rising charity sector led by wealthy financiers and civic elites, or the reform-minded unions and activists of Lower Manhattan…. In the months after the fire, the Times and its philanthropic allies joined forces to popularize the idea that social crises should be managed not by immigrant reformers, labor advocates, or neighborhood coalitions, but by a select class of elite and supposedly “scientific” charitable institutions. In doing so, they elevated a new language of expertise around poverty and public welfare that would leave a lasting mark on American civic life.

And what are the tens of thousands of American social workers thinking in these days of depression? What are they actually accomplishing? To what extent do they comprehend the basic causes of the increased need for their activities? Are they ready to tell the truth about social conditions as they, and perhaps only they, know them to be? As one who has called herself professional social worker for years on end, I must answer regretfully that most social workers are much too busy to think about the social implications of their task. They are failing utterly to hold back the Rood tide of social chaos. Many of them, of course, realize that economic maladjustment lies at the root of the need for most social work, but comparatively few social workers regard it as their concern. Of those who see the futility of much present-day social work and privately admit the paucity of its tangible results, not many are saying, above a whisper, that social work effects no social reforms.