American Communist History最新文献

{"title":"United States Communist History Bibliography 2018","authors":"P. Filardo","doi":"10.1080/14743892.2019.1599626","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14743892.2019.1599626","url":null,"abstract":"“... essays... examine five major areas: World War I’s impact on labor and socialist movements; the history of coerced labor; patterns of ethnic and class identification; forms of working-class collective action; and the struggles related to trade union democracy and independent working-class politics...many essays highlight how hard-won transnational ties allowed Australians and Americans to influence each other’s trade union and political cultures.” Chad Pearson, “Twentieth century US labor history: Pedagogy, politics, and controversies part 2.” History Compass 16, no. 8 (2018): 1–16. AMERICAN COMMUNIST HISTORY 137","PeriodicalId":35150,"journal":{"name":"American Communist History","volume":"18 1","pages":"168 - 97"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/14743892.2019.1599626","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47621303","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Cuban Revolution in America: Havana and the Making of a United States Left, 1968–1992, by Teishan Latner","authors":"Stephen G. Rabe","doi":"10.1093/JAHIST/JAZ154","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/JAHIST/JAZ154","url":null,"abstract":"In his recent book, Cuban Revolution in America: Havana and the Making of a United States Left, 1968–1992, Teishan Latner makes a key contribution to the growing literature about the Cuban Revolution and U.S. leftists. Cuban Revolution in America provides a multi-faceted look into why and how “the Cuban revolutionary project remained the most consistent foreign influence on left-wing radicalism in the United States” (6) in the 1960s and subsequent decades. Through five thoroughly-researched and well-written chapters, Latner convincingly demonstrates this argument, and lays an important foundation for the political history between the U.S. radicals and the Cuban State. A range of scholars and readers will find Latner’s book compelling. Cuban Revolution in America speaks to historians of U.S. foreign relations, political history, and U.S.–Cuba relations, while scholars of African American Studies and Cuban American history will find much here. There is a lesser emphasis on cultural history, although Latner certainly posits the idea of the radical imagination. And although communist history is not the book’s focus, scholars of the left should consider this required reading. It is these multiple lefts, white, Latinx, and African American, that Latner explores over twenty-five plus years, arguing that Cuba was the biggest global inspiration for a new generation of activists who shunned the Old Left for the new. Latner begins his book in the cauldron of the late 1960s, arguing that U.S.–Cuba connections in the early 1960s have had greater coverage. The first chapter on the Venceremos Brigade (VB) provides Cuban Revolution in America’s foundation. Beginning in 1969, and continuing to this day, the Brigade sought to facilitate solidarity with the Cuban Revolution by bringing work brigades of Americans to Cuba and challenging U.S. policy towards Cuba in the United States: “a radical Peace Corps for the civil rights and antiwar generation” (28). As Latner points out, the Brigade is woefully understudied given the thousands of “brigadistas” in our midst. Originally conceived of by Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) leader Carl Oglesby, the VB arose as SDS splintered, and Latner argues that it was “as much about the reconstitution of the U.S. Left,” (34) and the transformation of U.S. society as it was about supporting Cuba. The Brigade was marred by its official homophobic stance and marked by racial tension. But the persistence required for the Brigade to send diverse delegations to Cuba year after year amidst enormous logistical challenges and political tension makes it a fitting microcosm for the U.S. left’s solidarity with the Cuban Revolution in the coming decades: fraught and messy, yet creative and persistent. Another consistent thread is the United States government’s antipathy not only toward the Cuban Revolution, but with the U.S. left’s support of it. In chapter two, Latner examines the dialectic between Cuba’s replacement of the Soviet Unio","PeriodicalId":35150,"journal":{"name":"American Communist History","volume":"18 1","pages":"171 - 174"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48313433","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"“I Want You to Realize How Unfair You Have Been:” The Cold War’s Effect on the Friendship of Arthur Garfield Hays and C. Fulton Oursler","authors":"R. Hamm","doi":"10.1080/14743892.2018.1523533","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14743892.2018.1523533","url":null,"abstract":"To begin, it was a strong friendship. For about twenty-five years, Arthur Garfield Hays and Charles Fulton Oursler were close friends, spending time together, writing to each other, and sharing ideas and confidences. Even though they sprung from different backgrounds they had many similarities in aspiration and personality. For a while they embraced the same causes and positions. But they also differed widely in their reception of cultural and social modernism and over various public issues. Yet, for decades they managed to bridge significant cultural and ideological differences. Oursler saw Hays as one of his great friends and Hays treated Oursler as one of his closest friends. But with the Cold War heating up, and the fears of internal communist subversion reaching new peaks in 1950, their friendship was altered by Oursler. He wrote a letter to Hays which accused him of being a dupe of the communists at home and someone who refused to criticize communist regimes’ actions abroad. Hays in several replies to this letter attempted (and failed) to bridge the gulf that had grown between them over issues raised by the Cold War. Though patched together, never in the few years that remained in each man’s life was it restored to what it had been. This story is significant not just because Hays and Oursler were important opinion shapers at the time, but because what it shows about the effects of the second red scare on people’s thought and lives. It shows how the public disagreements of the Cold War entered people’s private lives. Arthur Garfield Hays was one of America’s leading civil liberties lawyers and one the nation’s leading advocates for civil liberties. Born to a prosperous Jewish-American manufacturing family from Rochester, Hays was educated at City College, Columbia, and Columbia Law School. From his family’s move to the city when he was twelve, cosmopolitan New York City became his only real home. He was a religious skeptic who always identified himself as a Jew. Before the First World War, he had established himself among New York City’s elite bar. The income from his private practice underwrote his activities on behalf of civil liberties. He was a key lawyer for the young American Civil Liberties Union, serving as its co-general counsel from 1929 to 1954. He was one of the first free speech absolutists in the ACLU and he was a notable critic of over active policing. In the 1920s, he began writing articles and books on public issues, usually civil liberties related. He was the author of four popular books advocating civil liberties and was a frequent public speaker and appeared on both radio and television. Thus, through virtually every medium available he pushed the United States toward","PeriodicalId":35150,"journal":{"name":"American Communist History","volume":"17 1","pages":"318 - 339"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/14743892.2018.1523533","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44920708","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"American Politics in the Postwar Sunbelt: Conservative Growth in a Battleground Region","authors":"Philip F. Rubio","doi":"10.1080/14743892.2018.1479573","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14743892.2018.1479573","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":35150,"journal":{"name":"American Communist History","volume":"17 1","pages":"340 - 341"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/14743892.2018.1479573","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42961590","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Charles White: The Art and Politics of Humanism, 1947–1956","authors":"J. Murphy","doi":"10.1080/14743892.2018.1499263","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14743892.2018.1499263","url":null,"abstract":"Can abstract art lead to nuclear war? The idea seems farfetched, to say the least, but it had currency among postwar Marxists in the United States. In a 1953 article celebrating African-American artist, Charles White, Communist artist Hugo Gellert argued that “so-called abstract, non-objective” art—the avant-garde experiments of New York School painters like Jackson Pollock, Adolph Gottlieb, and Mark Rothko—had potentially cataclysmic consequences: “By their elimination of the human form and their negation of humanism,” Gellert wrote, “artists of this type help in their own way to condition the human mind to become reconciled to the possible annihilation of mankind. For there is a connection between destruction of the human form in the abstract and its actual atomic destruction.” However implausible, this dramatic leap from formal abstraction to atomic destruction hinged on the phrase the “negation of humanism.” Humanism served during the Cold War as the answer to what Marxist critics perceived as the “antihumanism” of nonfigurative abstract art, guilty-by-association with the wealthy patrons and elite institutions that supported it. The drawing by White accompanying Gellert’s article, Dawn of Life, represented a contrasting model of socialist humanism in its allegorical content and expressive figuration: a dove of peace released from, or alighting on, the open hands of a young black woman. The drawing appeared on the cover of Marxist monthly Masses & Mainstream in February 1953 (Figure 1), the same issue in which art and music critic Sidney Finkelstein’s essay, “Charles White’s Humanist Art,” anointed White the standard bearer for the journal’s ideology. “Compared to the infantile character of the formalist, non-objective and symbolist art,” Finkelstein wrote, “[White’s] portrayals of people have a true maturity which comes from the role he plays as a person and artist in social life.” From 1947 to 1956, White played a leading role “as a person and artist” in the social life of the radical left in New York. Beginning with his first one-person exhibition in 1947 at the progressive American Contemporary Art (ACA) Gallery, White emerged in the postwar period as the country’s preeminent socialist realist. From 1951 to 1956, he","PeriodicalId":35150,"journal":{"name":"American Communist History","volume":"17 1","pages":"282 - 300"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/14743892.2018.1499263","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43525624","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Sex, Communism and the Spanish Civil War: The Diaries of Stanley Postek","authors":"Vernon L. Pedersen","doi":"10.1080/14743892.2018.1516431","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14743892.2018.1516431","url":null,"abstract":"In March of 1939 Stanley Postek, sat down in front of the window of his room at the Hotel Minerva in Paris and opened a blank notebook. On the first page of the book he wrote the title “My Memories of Spain.” The M and the S in the title are much larger than the other letters and are surrounded by dots to either emphasize the letters or present the illusion that they shine. The M looks almost like a valentine’s heart with a half smiling face hidden inside it, while the striped S, somewhat disturbingly, resembles a headless snake. Although the elaborate title appears juvenile Postek’s signature is very formal, written in large clear cursive letters of the sort used for signing legal documents. Postek turned to the next page and wrote a paragraph describing how many deep breaths he had to take before picking up his pen then added another paragraph about not being able to write. The young merchant seaman intended to record his recent experiences fighting as a member of the Abraham Lincoln battalion in the Spanish Civil War. But, despite the immediacy of events he doubted he could recapture the intensity of his experiences because of the loss of “the little diaries and sheets” he kept while serving with the International Brigades. The notes had been strongly written and timely, elements Postek feared he could not reproduce. Aware that his journal might not remain private Postek asked his future readers, when tempted to “giggle, sneer or criticize,” to remember that he was not writing for their benefit but for his own. Postek’s journal benefited him greatly, as writing it helped him deal with the trauma he endured in Spain, but, the reader benefits as well. Postek’s diaries do more than recount his experiences in Spain, they document the life of a seaman and communist organizer, provide insight into a sexual milieu profoundly at odds with mainstream, Hays Code America and tell the story of a life lived at the edge of society and yet at the center of world events. Postek kept numerous diaries over the course of his life; this study is primarily concerned with two: “My Memories of Spain” and a second journal that he called his logbook. The logbook fits inside “Memories.” Postek’s first entry in his Spanish memoir is dated 3 March 1939 he wrote in the book steadily until July when he stopped writing for three months. A single entry in October announced his intention to move to Boston and recounted a drunken party with two of his girlfriends in New York the night before his departure. The logbook starts on 23 November 1939 the same day that Postek signed on board the SS Oneida, a cargo ship running between Boston, New York, Charleston and Jacksonville. Postek declares that he is making a new start reinforcing","PeriodicalId":35150,"journal":{"name":"American Communist History","volume":"17 1","pages":"301 - 317"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/14743892.2018.1516431","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42617528","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Dan Leab—An Appreciation","authors":"J. Ryan","doi":"10.1080/14743892.2018.1549207","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14743892.2018.1549207","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":35150,"journal":{"name":"American Communist History","volume":"17 1","pages":"267 - 268"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/14743892.2018.1549207","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48933124","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Reproductive Sovereignty in Soviet and American Socialism during the Great Depression","authors":"D. Lynn","doi":"10.1080/14743892.2018.1491175","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14743892.2018.1491175","url":null,"abstract":"It was a warm summer night in August 1935 when Dorothy Sherwood walked into the Newburgh, New York police station with her son’s murdered body. Earlier that day, Sherwood took her 2-year-old son Jimmy to a creek and held his face under the water. She then took his body home, where she changed him into clean clothes and brought his body to the police station where she admitted her crime to an “astounded” police lieutenant. Sherwood told the police that she had recently fallen on tough times and had been abandoned by Jimmy’s father. After failing to find permanent employment and facing eviction, Sherwood decided to take her son’s life because it was “too hard to make a living” for herself and her children. Reporting for the American Communist Women’s magazine, The Woman Today, Dorothy Dunbar Bromley zeroed in on what led Sherwood to murder her own son. It was poverty, a poverty unique to women and children. Bromley argued that despite Sherwood’s best efforts, she did not have “even half a chance.” Sherwood grew up without her mother, and her father left her with any family member that was willing to take her in. He used his daughter in a barter system, selling her labor to his family members who would treat her not as a relation but as a domestic. After caring for other people’s homes and children for several years, Sherwood left and traveled with a Salvation Army family for a time. She also tried her hand at waitressing. Eventually, she found herself working with a burlesque troop, an occupation the press immediately zeroed in on. But that too did not last. Sherwood struggled to find steady work and had no home to speak of. But, then, she met her husband, and for a few years of her life, there was stability. At 20-years old, Sherwood gave birth to her first child, a little girl, and for a time she was happy and settled. Until her husband contracted tuberculosis and soon after died, leaving Sherwood to care for herself and her child. Attempting to recreate the years of stability she found with her husband, Sherwood took up with a man who, according to Dunbar Bromley, “promised to look after her and her baby,” but instead he “left her cold” and with another child. Alone and with two children, Sherwood desperately tried to secure work, but that proved difficult. She tried to have her young son placed in a","PeriodicalId":35150,"journal":{"name":"American Communist History","volume":"17 1","pages":"269 - 281"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-09-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/14743892.2018.1491175","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47277114","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Politics of Non-Assimilation: The American Jewish Left in the Twentieth Century","authors":"Melvyn Dubofsky","doi":"10.1080/14743892.2018.1491222","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14743892.2018.1491222","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":35150,"journal":{"name":"American Communist History","volume":"17 1","pages":"342 - 343"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-09-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/14743892.2018.1491222","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49622719","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Communists and American Farmers in the 1920s","authors":"William C. Pratt","doi":"10.1080/14743892.2018.1460968","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14743892.2018.1460968","url":null,"abstract":"On 28 April 1921, New York police and Bureau of Investigation agents raided a Greenwich Village studio, arresting several people and seizing a large cache of Communist documents. The raid was reported in the New York Times and later many of the documents were discussed at a 1924 U.S. Senate hearing on diplomatic recognition of Soviet Russia. Among the seizedmaterials were two items that related to Communist interests in American farmers. The first of these documents was an “Agrarian Report,” which was prepared to brief the Comintern in Moscow; the second was a letter from the editor of the Nonpartisan League (NPL)’s daily newspaper in Fargo. In a way, these two artifacts reflect the dual character of the American Communist experience. On the one hand, Communists saw themselves part of an international movement directed from Moscow; on the other, they were tied to an older indigenous left as well. In this article, I explore these two themes in regard to Communist efforts in the countryside in the 1920s. In recent years, a treasure trove of documents from this era previously unavailable to scholars have been made available inMoscow.Much of what follows is drawn from those materials, but I also have utilized FBI documents and movement and local newspapers among other sources.","PeriodicalId":35150,"journal":{"name":"American Communist History","volume":"17 1","pages":"162 - 175"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/14743892.2018.1460968","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42114698","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}