Jason DeParle’s American Dream

Lost Prophet: The Life and Times of Bayard Rustin by John D’Emilio The Free Press, 2003 576 pp $35 Time on Two Crosses: The Collected Writings of Bayard Rustin Devon W. Carbado and Donald Wiese, eds. Cleis Press, 2003 355 …

When Michael Harrington’s The Other America was published in 1962, Larry Moore was in elementary school on the north side of Milwaukee. His parents had moved from the rural south a few years earlier to find work in an African-American …

SEARCHING FOR AMERICA’S HEART: RFK AND THE RENEWAL OF HOPE byPeter Edelman Houghton Mifflin, 2001 262 pp $26 THE PRICE OF CITIZENSHIP: REDEFINING THE AMERICAN WELFARE STATE by Michael B. Katz Metropolitan, 2001 469 pp $35 THE LONDON feminists at …

Before we talk about Seattle, a few words about Milwaukee. In February 1839—less than a decade after they’d dispossessed the Menominees and other local Native Americans—the settlers of southeastern Wisconsin had a problem to solve. Hundreds of farmers had staked …

Andre Gide: A life in the Present by Alan Sheridan Harvard University Press, 1999 634 pp $35 One of the hardest tasks of André Gide’s long life was a translation of Hamlet, which he completed in 1942 after twenty years …

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 …

The November 1997 defeat of “fast track” was arguably the AFL-CIO’s greatest public-policy triumph in a generation. The failure of Congress to extend presidential fast track negotiating authority—which would next have been used in an attempt to broaden the North …

On July 2, 1977, a seventeen-year-old boy set fire to an abandoned tenement building on New York City’s Lower East Side. This fire was just a flicker in an enormous mid-1970s arson wave that struck New York’s poorest neighborhoods; it …

A few years ago, it was revealed that the Southern Baptist Convention had compiled elaborate demographic maps of the United States. The maps displayed painstakingly calculated estimates of the number of citizens in each state who had been saved (46.1 …

How successfully has the American labor movement revived since John Sweeney took the reins a year and a half ago? One measure is the return of full-throated labor bashing in our public life. For the past generation or so, attacking …