CWU-sponsored UPW Working-Class History Book: “Grasshoppers, Stonkers and Straight Eights:   George Massey and Bristol Post Office Workers 1930-1976″   by Dave Chapple, Branch Chair, Bristol and District Amal. This book has been published with the financial assistance of the CWU, the Lipman-Miliband Trust and the South West Region TUC. Dave’s book is centred o...

The Picturing United States History website is a project of the American Social History Project/Center for Media and Learning at the City University of New York Graduate Center. It aims to provide educators with information and resources which can help them use visual materials (photographs, images, political cartoons, prints) to teach American history. It contains a collection of 'lessons in...

THE hand of history belonged to George Bush yesterday when he welcomed Barack Obama, the first black president-elect of the United States, into the White House.

Louis Proyect has done us all an unwitting favour by drawing attention to a priceless assessment of Howard Zinn’s “People’s History of the United States” in the New Yorker by Jill Lepore: Every fall, the freshmen troop into town tugging laundry bags stuffed with extra-long fitted sheets and trunks packed with aspirations, Scrabble, and socks. The

Trying to understand the madness of America? There could be no better start than to listen to this, History and the "United States of Amnesia" - A Democracy Now Interview with Gore Vidal. "You must remember, this is a people that has no culture, that has never had one." Your essential Thursday listening...

I've never taken a poll, but I would guess that about half the readers of this blog have read Ian Toll's book Six Frigates, the story about the birth of the US Navy. The story captures the time period between about 1775 until the War of 1812, the last war between the United States and Great Britain. It is an excellent book that captures the history of the US Navy, but also describes in detail the ...

If you read this blog and have not read Six Frigates by Ian Toll, what are you doing reading this blog? After reading the hard copy, I bought the book on tape so when I travel, I can throw it in the CD player and avoid draining the battery on my iPOD, where I also happen to have the book loaded. Six Frigates is a history lesson of a time when the United States needed evangelists and developed a ma...

Asked why there had been talk of the Home Secretary performing a "u-turn" on knife criminals attending A&E, the Prime Minister's Spokesman (PMS) replied that the Home Secretary had made the position quite clear at Home Office Oral Questions. What the Home Secretary and the Home Office had been talking about, and had been clear about throughout, was developing Knife Referral Schemes. These were sch...

Obama’s spending plans in the United States have got leftwingers in the United States creaming their pants. And quite rightly too: Mr. Obama would overhaul health care, begin to arrest global warming, expand the federal role in education and shift more costs to some corporations and the wealthiest taxpayers. … Mr. Obama would slash about $5 billion in

From Socialist Worker Howard Zinn Historian and veteran activist Howard Zinn is the author of the classic book A People’s History of the United States. I CONFESS I am excited by the thought of Obama becoming president, even though I am painfully aware of his limitations–his smooth, articulate intelligence covering up a quite traditional approach to domestic and