Perhaps the threat we are facing from COVID-19 will provide an opportunity to create a more equal and just economy, one that is also in greater harmony with our natural world.
We are rightly concerned with saving lives from disease. But we must also consider the potentially deadly consequences of authoritarianism and prejudice unleashed by an economic depression.
We cannot afford to overlook the public use of reason: reason that does not simply solve a given problem, but asks further unsettling questions, such as how did this problem arise in the first place?
It is clear that if many white Americans feel alienated and powerless, they will vote for a candidate whose stories promise a better future or greater status for themselves, even if that candidate tells incredible falsehoods and appeals to racism
No president can end an epidemic single handedly, but they can inspire a popular movement that eradicates a disease. Such was the case with Franklin Roosevelt and polio.
Insufficient attention was paid to the first influenza death in the city. The United States was in the throes of the Great War, and the Kaiser, not the flu, was on the minds of Philadelphians.
The coronavirus will not succeed in doing to American society what fascism did to Europe in the 1930s and 1940s, but it has sparked a virulent wave of racism and intolerance, especially aimed at Chinese Americans.
If history shows Hoover followed the wrong path for principled reasons, what will it say about Donald Trump, who has several tools that were not available to Hoover?
Gardener’s historic appointment as U.S. Civil Service Commissioner marked one symbolic step toward the idea that women should be universally recognized as “self- respecting, self- directing human units with brains and bodies sacredly their own.”
Defying the broader conservative political forces of the time, the Farm Security Administration extended health care to tens of thousands of migratory agricultural workers because it understood that farmworkers’ health was vital to the nation’s wellbeing.
It is well past time for lawmakers to provide permanent paid sick days protections, so that no one is forced to work sick, risk their paycheck or risk their job.
Comparing the first 100 days in power of Franklin Roosevelt and Adolf Hitler offers a sobering reminder of the consequences of decisions pursued by leaders in crisis.
We are all struggling, and we all need the distractions that only absurdity can provide. So laugh now and then; see the silly, the absurd and the comic in life.
A Supreme Court decision in United States v. Sineneng-Smith that broadens the authority of the federal government to suppress the rights of advocates for undocumented immigrants could divide the nation irreparably.
This year feels to many progressives like a lost opportunity. With Joseph Biden seemingly certain to win the Democratic nomiatuion, what can progressives learn and apply to the future from the experience of 2020?
A sizable percentage of Americans get their sense of history through television documentaries. The history of nonfiction filmmaking offers crucial insight on how we got to, and how we might escape, a "post-truth" world.
HBO’s prestige adaptation of Philip Roth’s 2004 novel The Plot Against America makes it worthwhile to examine whether fascism is really so alien to the United States as many wish to believe.
