Spring 2025

It was a little more than 150 years ago that the transition from the feudal order to the democratic nation-state was debated in the Paulskirche in Frankfurt during the German Revolution. Today we have to begin a debate on the …

W. E. B. Du Bois and American Political Thought: Fabianism and the Color Line by Adolph Reed, Jr. Oxford University Press, 1997, 282 pp., $35 W. E. B. Du Bois’s productive use of his ninety-five years on earth casts a …

There may be no more contentious issue in today’s labor movement than union democracy. Almost everybody agrees that members should have the right to elect officers, hold regular meetings, and approve contracts negotiated by their leaders. But not everyone agrees …

As New York’s museums have come to rely on mounting blockbuster exhibitions, the museum going public has grown inured to them. The Impressionists, the great modernists like Picasso and Matisse, and a few postwar New York painters will always draw …

In 1980, I began to keep a file of letters from my father. I don’t remember exactly why I decided to preserve the letters, to treat them as historical documents and not just as his re¬sponses of and for the …

President Clinton and governors across the United States love to tell us that welfare reform is working. Reform is a friendly sounding term for this decade’s explosion of state and federal initiatives that cut welfare benefits, end cash assistance to …

In 1913, when a member of the U.S. Commission on Industrial Relations asked him how Pullman porters were supposed to live on $27.50 per month, L.S. Hungerford, Pullman’s general manager, replied: “All I can say is that you can get …

A kind of euphoria surrounded this summer’s UAW picket lines in Flint, Michigan. Nearly everyone who drove past the lines honked a horn or pumped a fist in solidarity; hardly an hour went by without a restaurant van pulling up …

I find the word “recuse” poignant. It seems weighty, official–perspicacious rather than apologetic. “Excuse me” sounds as if there is something to be pardoned, even if that is not necessarily so. A little like pleading the Fifth Amendment. But if …

If memoirs are always full of lies—and they always are—the measure of a good memoirist is how well she tricks us. Of course, all texts are slippery; it would be foolish to suggest that memoirists are amoral or immoral or …

There is—or used to be—a high unprotected railroad trestle on the outskirts of Ann Arbor. Narrow, constructed of massive beams, it was straight out of a cinematographer’s imagination, just the sort of place that a romantically suicidal undergraduate would think …