Traveling by train to Philadelphia, going North, you will pass by Chester, Pennsylvania, a city that has been in decline for more than half a century. Founded in 1682, the same year as Philadelphia, Chester…
Posts tagged as “nation”
Sixty years ago this week the “forgotten war” came to an inconclusive end. The Korean war was perfectly mistimed for me. On 25 June 1950, the day I graduated from the University of California, Los…
Having gorged unsustainably on the public sector of Michigan’s largest city for decades, having left empty schools, libraries, and office buildings like gnawed bones scattered about a massacre, having erased whole city services leaving only…
Oralia Maceda, an immigrant mother from Oaxaca, asked the obvious last weekend in Fresno. At a meeting, talking about the Senate immigration reform bill, she wanted to know why Senators would spend almost $50 billion…
July 24th marks the anniversary of Anthony Johnson acquiring 250 acres of land in Northampton County, Virginia during the summer of 1651. Anthony Johnson was a free black man, brought to the colony aboard the…
Harry Anslinger, the longtime Commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, is widely considered the prime mover behind marijuana prohibition. But during the Congressional debate on prohibition in the spring of 1937, Anslinger was just…
In the past few days, in the largest prison protest in California’s history, nearly 30,000 inmates have gone on hunger strike in the country’s largest prison system. Such near-insurrections are not unusual in America’s prison-industrial complex.