How Hollywood’s Black Friday Strike Changed Labor Across America

A 1945 Union vs. Studios Battle Set Off Broad Right-Wing Hysteria—Its Lessons Should Resonate Today

It was October 5, 1945. The Conference of Studio Unions (CSU), a union representing craft laborers in Los Angeles, including painters, carpenters, set designers, cartoonists, and others, was seven months into a major strike that was causing Hollywood studio moguls to panic. Although major studios, including Columbia, RKO, and Universal, had over 100 unreleased films in the can, ready to be released, the CSU’s strike actions, as well as movie theater boycotts, were an effective blow against the post-war studio system.

Now, the strikers gathered at the Warner Bros. employee entrance …

by Gerald Horne and Anthony Ballas | November 9, 2023

A Mid-Century Playbook for Saving Progressive American Education

Fifty Years Ago, Parents United to Get the Far-Right John Birch Society Out of Their Schools

by Matthew Dallek | September 19, 2023

This May, an email landed in my inbox. The correspondent, who’d come across my new book on the John Birch Society, wanted to share how members of this far-right anticommunist …

How an American Boy Learned About Democracy by Living in the Beijing Hotel | Zocalo Public Square • Arizona State University • Smithsonian

What Communist China Taught a 6-Year-Old American Boy

With Tiananmen Square as My Playground, I Learned Lifelong Lessons About Diplomacy, Authority, and Democracy

by Joe Mathews | June 2, 2019

A worker comes to Beijing, to Communist Party headquarters, and asks to see Chairman Mao.

A soldier stops him. “You can’t see Mao,” he says. “He’s dead.”

The worker returns the …

The (Actual) Communist Agents Who Lurked Among Us

American Fears About Soviet Spycraft Never Seemed to Match Reality

By Jonathan Haslam | September 26, 2016

Russian spies held a morbid fascination in the minds of Americans dating back to the Red Scare in 1919, following the Bolshevik Revolution and the creation of the Communist International, …

“Frivolous” Humanities Helped Prisoners Survive in Communist Romania

Covertly Studying Language and Literature Connected Captives and Freed Their Minds

By Irina Dumitrescu | May 25, 2016

In a recent New York Times article on the movement to promote university majors promising higher employment and income, Anthony Carnevale, a professor at Georgetown University, sums up the utilitarian …

How Latin America’s Left Could Lose Their Scapegoat

Will Obama’s Trip to Cuba and Argentina Be the Nail in the Coffin for the Region’s Tired Anti-American Script?

By Andrés Martinez | March 28, 2016

Barack Obama took a deserved victory lap in Latin America last week.

Critics of the president’s opening to Cuba accuse Obama of appeasing the Castro regime, but they missed the historic …

Communism