Below you will find a list of sources and readings referenced in each episode of Ending the Myth. Links will be given where possible, but www.z-lib.org is an excellent resource for e-books.
Table of Contents
- EP 0 - The Frontier Thesis
- EP 1 - The Road Not Taken
- EP 2 - Expansion and Native Americans
- EP 3 - Andrew Jackson
- EP 4 - The Safety Valve
- EP 5 - The Conquest of Texas
- EP 6 - Resistance and Abolition
- EP 7 - America’s Worst President w/ Matt Christman
- EP 8 - The Real West w/ Richard White
- EP 9 - The Pact of 1898
- EP 10 - What’s so Progressive About Eras, Anyway?
- EP 10.5 - It’s the Friends We Made Along the Way
- EP 11 – The Nadir of Race Relations pt 1
- EP 11.5 – The Nadir of Race Relations pt 2
- EP 12 – The Politics of Travel w/ Ryan Archibald
- EP 13 – The Interwar Years
- EP 14 – A Psychological Twist
- EP 15 – The Truman Show w/ Justin Roll
- EP 15.5 – Talkin Truman Show w/ Justin Roll
- EP 16 – In the Bretton Woods w/ Richard Wolff
- EP 16.5 – More Q&A!
- EP 17 – The New Red Scare
- EP 17.5 – Discussing the New Red Scare
EP 0 – The Frontier Thesis
- In this episode we cover material discussed in Chapter 7 of End of the Myth
- The quote in the intro is from p269-271 in End of the Myth
- The “frontier thesis” comes from Frederick Jackson Tuner’s influential essay, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History.” Here is a link to the paper that Turner read before the American Historical Association in 1893 that would eventually be published in Turner’s book of essays, The Frontier in American History (1920).
- On the Dunning School view of history:
- WEB Du Bois’ Black Reconstruction (1935) was written as a refutation of the Dunning School view of history. The final chapter, “The Propaganda of History,” remains one of the best critiques of the reactionary movement available.
- On the rise of the Eugenics movement:
- Journalist Edwin Black has written an extensive and very readable history of the eugenics movement, *War Against the Weak* (2004). Stephen Jay Gould’s The Mismeasure of Man (1981) remains the best critique of the “science” of the eugenics movement.
- Closing quote
- The closing quote is from Charles and Mary Beard’s Basic History of the United States (1944), p 362-363. Charles and Mary Beard were leading figures in the school of progressive history that came about at the turn of the 20th century. Focusing on the role of capitalism and class interest in their work, the Beards wrote some of the first histories of America from a left-perspective. Charles Beard’s An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution (1913) remains one of the best works on America’s idiotic Constitution available.
EP 1 – The Road Not Taken
- The intro and the theme of this episode comes from Lerone Bennett Jr’s excellent 1970 article, “The Road Not Taken.” Lerone Bennett was a journalist and historian who, in 1954, wrote an explosive article titled “Thomas Jefferson’s Negro Grandchildren” that brought the story of Sally Hemmings into the popular consciousness. In 1958, Bennett became the executive editor of Ebony, where he served as the politics editor for the magazine into the 1970s.
- Bennett’s “The Road Not Taken” as it appeared in Ebony in 1970.
- An expanded version of “The Road Not Taken” from Bennett’s essay collection, The Shaping of Black America (1975)
- The Trial of John Punch
- The 1640 trial of John Punch is a critical point for the development of slavery in America. An excellent discussion of the case and its ramifications can be found on the now defunct Uncivil Podcast.
- Basing their economy around slavery forced the South to create a cultural/legal/political superstructure for the maintenance of the peculiar institution. For more on the ways that slavery shaped the culture of the South see:
- John Hope Franklin’s, The Militant South (1956)
- British defense of slavery:
- In 1745, an unnamed British merchant wrote an influential pamphlet arguing that the British empire should reinvest in the African slave trade and the use of slavery in agriculture. It is noteworthy in that it explicitly points out the economic advantages to be gained through chattel slavery and argues that it is a competitive imperative that the Britain double down on slavery.
- Thomas Jefferson and violence
- The history of Thomas Jefferson and slavery has not just been forgotten out of a polite respect for one of the founding fathers. It was, in many cases, intentionally ignored in order to write hagiographies of the man. When Lerone Bennett Jr published an article about Sally Hemmings and her family’s claim to be descendants of Jefferson in 1954, it was met with scorn from the popular press (in 1994 it would be proven correct). Similarly, an essay in Smithsonian Magazine in 2012, “The Dark Side of Thomas Jefferson,” challenged people’s view of the man – receiving scorn from some quarters and half-hearted rebuttals from others. The author, Henry Wiencek, would expand on the article a year later with his book Master of the Mountain.
- Thomas Jefferson and the invention of the dumbwaiter
- In a 1995 essay critiquing what they dubbed the newly developing “Californian Ideology” in tech, English media theorists Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron made this interesting analysis of the purpose of such technology as the dumbwaiter:
- “The Dumb Waiter - As Hegel pointed out, the tragedy of the masters is that they cannot escape from dependence on their slaves. Rich white Californians need their darker-skinned fellow humans to work in their factories, pick their crops, look after their children and tend their gardens. Unable to surrender wealth and power, the white people of California can instead find spiritual solace in their worship of technology. If human slaves are ultimately unreliable, then mechanical ones will have to be invented. The search for the holy grail of Artificial Intelligence reveals this desire for the Golem - a strong and loyal slave whose skin is the colour of the earth and whose innards are made of sand. Techno-utopians imagine that it is possible to obtain slave-like labour from inanimate machines. Yet, although technology can store or amplify labour, it can never remove the necessity for humans to invent, build and maintain the machines in the first place. Slave labour cannot be obtained without somebody being enslaved. At his estate at Monticello, Jefferson invented many ingenious gadgets - including a 'dumb waiter' to mediate contact with his slaves. In the late twentieth century, it is not surprising that this liberal slave-owner is the hero of those who proclaim freedom while denying their brown-skinned fellow citizens those democratic rights said to be inalienable.”
- In a 1995 essay critiquing what they dubbed the newly developing “Californian Ideology” in tech, English media theorists Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron made this interesting analysis of the purpose of such technology as the dumbwaiter:
- Role of slavery in the American Revolution:
- In 2014, historian Gerald Horne published The Counter-Revolution of 1776. Horne sparked immediate controversy by trying to bring the issue of slavery to the fore in the events that led to the American war for independence. An intentionally provocative work, it is an important read.
EP 2 – Expansion and Native Americans
- In this episode we cover material discussed in chapters 1&2 in End of the Myth
- The story of Frederick Stump from the intro is from p21-22 of End of the Myth
- Additional material for this episode was pulled from:
- David Stannard’s *American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World* (1992)
- Ward Churchill’s A Little Matter of Genocide: Holocaust and Denial in the Americas 1492 to the Present (2001)
- Reginald Horsman’s Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism (1986)
- Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s An Indigenous People’s History of the United States (2015)
- For more on Indian Removal and the case for labeling it a genocide, read Ward Churchill’s essay “‘Nits Make Lice’: The Extermination of North American Indians, 1607-1996”
- Cicero
- The quote on Cicero is from an excellent talk Michael Parenti gave on his excellent book The Assassination of Julius Caesar.
- For more on the Comanche Empire, see Pekka Hämäläinen’s The Comanche Empire (2009)
- Quote in the outro is from p44-45 of End of the Myth
EP 3 – Andrew Jackson
- In this episode we cover material discussed in chapter 3 of End of the Myth
- Intro Quote is from End of the Myth, p51-52
- Jackson’s early biography pulled from:
- Robert Remini’s Andrew Jackson and the Course of American Empire, 1767-1821 (1977)
- James Ely Jr, “Andrew Jackson as Tennessee State Court Judge, 1798-1804,” Tennessee Historical Quarterly, Vol 40 No 2 (Summer 1981)
- The British nationalist murals in Ulster that we mentioned:
- Ulster nationalist points gun at the viewer
- The “Sons of Ulster”
- Another mural we didn’t discuss, which was painted by Irish nationalist detailing the relationship between British occupational forces, British nationalists in Ulster, and the Apartheid government of South Africa
- One of many Irish nationalist murals of Frederick Douglass
- For more on dueling and the comically stupid and violent early 19th century see John Hope Franklin, The Militant South, 1800-1861 (1956) or listen to the segments “The Duel” and “The Dishonor Code” from the Backstory with the American History Guys podcast.
- For a look at the political rise of Andrew Jackson, see:
- Charles Sellers’ The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815-1846 (1992)
- Jackson’s Inauguration
- “An Inauguration for the People,” Wall Street Journal, 1/20/2009
- There is also a good segment on Jackson’s inauguration on the “A History of Populism” episode of the excellent podcast BackStory with the American History Guys.
- They also have a good segment on elite concerns over Andrew Jackson.
- For more on the struggle over Indian removal in Georgia and Jackson’s subsequent policies, see:
- Reginald Horsman’s Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism (1986)
- For more on Harsha Walia’s writings on Jackson and its connection to the formation of future borders and imperialism, see Border and Rule (2021)
- For more on Marx’s theory of proletarianization:
- Karl Marx, Capital Vol. I Chapter Twenty-Five Section 3 “Progressive Production of a Relative surplus population or Industrial Reserve Army” See also:
- Ellen Meiksins Wood wrote an excellent book The Origin of Capitalism (1999). Wood gives a fantastic overview and historical analysis of the transition from feudalism to capitalism, goes in-depth about the social transformations and dramatic changes in relationships between human beings and nature that had to happen for capitalism to form. Through this history she aptly describes the process of proletarianization, as well as marxist alternatives. (pdf here).
- David Harvey, Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism (2014) Chapter 13: Social Reproduction
- Guy Debord, The Society of Spectacle (1967) Pg 8 section 26
- For a more modern take built on top of Marx’s proletarianization theory, see Harry Braverman, Labour and Monopoly Capital (1974). Braverman expanded on the proletarianization theory in a new neoliberal context, arguing that many groups of middle-class workers (notably routine clerical employees and skilled artisans) were being effectively proletarianized by having their labour dehumanized or de-skilled.
- Frantz Fanon’s thoughts on a national bourgeoisie and elite can be found in chapter 3 of Wretched of the Earth (1961), "The Trials and Tribulations of National Consciousness"
- Here is a small sample of the huge number of articles comparing Trump and Jackson:
- “The New Old Hickory,” US News & World Report, 2/13/2017
- “Trump Cites Andrew Jackson as his Hero – and a Reflection of Himself,” Washington Post, 3/15/2017
- “Donald Trump Truly is the Heir to the Legacy of Andrew Jackson,” The New Republic, 8/3/2020
- And, of course, the inevitable flurry of “wELl aKsuAlLy” articles in response:
- “What Would Andrew Jackson Think of Donald Trump?” CNN, 5/2/2017
- “Even Andrew Jackson Showed More Leadership than Donald Trump in a Pandemic,” Washington Post, 4/1/2020.
- “Donald Trump, the Man who Would Not be Jackson,” The Hill, 12/18/2020
- Karl Marx, Capital Vol. I Chapter Twenty-Five Section 3 “Progressive Production of a Relative surplus population or Industrial Reserve Army” See also:
- Outro Quote is from End of the Myth, p58
EP 4 – The Safety Valve
- In this episode we cover material discussed in chapter 4 of End of the Myth
- Intro Quote is from End of the Myth, p70-71
- On the writing of the Constitution:
- Charles Beard’s An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution (1913) remains the best book on the class motives that forged the document
- Michael Parenti’s essay “A Constitution for the Few” in his book Democracy for the Few is a nice summary of Beard’s argument.
- WEB Du Bois’s discussion of white workers is from Black Reconstruction which you should consider mandatory reading. It is not just one of the greatest histories ever written, it is one of the great pieces of American literature.
- For a sociology of the Antebellum South, see John Hope Franklin’s, The Militant South (1956)
- The book Brian mentions that looks at 19th century horror literature through a capitalist lens is David McNally’s Monsters of the Market (2011).
- HG Wells discusses the real fears of “race suicide” brought on by the urban crisis of the late 19th century. From HG Wells The Time Machine (1894): “At first, proceeding from the problems of our own age, it seemed clear… that the gradual widening of the present merely temporary and social difference between the Capitalist and the Labourer, was the key to the whole position… Industry had gradually lost its birthright in the sky. I mean that it had gone deeper and deeper into larger and ever larger underground factories, spending a still-increasing amount of its time therein… Again, the exclusive tendency of richer people—due, no doubt, to the increasing refinement of their education, and the widening gulf between them and the rude violence of the poor—is already leading to the closing, in their interest, of considerable portions of the surface of the land… And this same widening gulf… will make the exchange between class and class, that promotion by intermarriage which at present retards the splitting of our species along lines of social stratification, less and less frequent. So, in the end, above ground you must have the Haves, pursuing pleasure and comfort and beauty, and below ground the Have-nots, the workers getting continually adapted to the conditions of their labour… [The workers] would become as well adapted to the conditions of underground life, and as happy in their way, as the Upper-world people were to theirs.”
- Marx’s response to Wakefield’s theory of colonization in Captial Vol 1 can be found here.
- The closing quote is from End of the Myth, p 81-82
EP 5 – The Conquest of Texas
- This wide-ranging discussion is meant to listened to alongside chapter 5 of End of the Myth
- The opening quote is from The New York Herald, “The News from Texas,” 7/6/1845
- Additional material for this episode is pulled from:
- Randolph Campbell’s An Empire for Slavery: The Peculiar Institution in Texas, 1821-1865 (1991)
- John Hope Franklin’s *The Militant South, 1800-1861 (1956)
- Reginald Horsman’s Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism (1981)
- Gary Clayton Anderson’s The Conquest of Texas: Ethnic Cleansing in the Promised Land, 1820-1875 (2005)
- Norman Graebner’s Empire on the Pacific: A Study in American Continental Expansion (1955)
- David Pletcher’s The Diplomacy of Annexation: Texas, Oregon, and the Mexican War (1973)
- Robert Johannsen’s To the Halls of the Montezumas: The Mexican War in the American Imagination (1985)
- For more on the Comanche Empire, see: Pekka Hämäläinen’s The Comanche Empire (2009)
- And for Spain’s efforts to control the Indian population in Texas, see Juliana Barr, Peace Came in the Form of a Woman: Indians and Spaniards in the Texas Borderlands (2007)
- The Haitian Revolution sent the US into its first full-scale panic. News from the island was banned in all Southern states and witch-hunts for “black Jacobins” continued for decades after. In an effort to strangle this new nation in its crib, the US cut off all trade to Haiti – the US’s second largest trading partner at the time – in the nation’s first attempt to use sanctions to punish another country’s people.
- For more see, Gerald Horne, Confronting Black Jacobins: The US, the Haitian Revolution, and the Origins of the Dominican Republic (2015)
- For US relations with Haiti in the modern era, see Paul Farmer, The Uses of Haiti (2005)
- The story of the Hatian Revolution is fascinating in itself and is worth learning about. See CLR James’ excellent book The Black Jacobins (1938) and season 4 of Mike Duncan’s Revolutions podcast
- “The connection between slavery and the martial spirit…”
- John Hope Franklin’s The Militant South
- Drew Gilpin Faust quote from Washington Post, “How Slavery Warped Jefferson’s Vision for the University of Virginia,” 11/1/2019
- For a humorous retelling of Jim Bowie’s life and adventures, see The Dollop ep 61: “Jim Bowie and the Sandbar Fight”
- For more on the role of the Battle of the Alamo in US history and a more accurate accounting of what happened see: Brian Burrough, Chris Tomlinson, and Jason Stanford’s Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of An American Myth (2021)
- For more on the Texas Rangers’ infamous history see:
- Julian Samora, Joe Bernal, & Albert Peña’s Gunpowder Justice: A Reassessment of the Texas Rangers (1979)
- The Senate hearing Brian mentioned investigating the Rangers was in 1919: Proceedings of the Joint Committee of the Texas Senate and the House in Investigating the Texas Rangers
- Herbert Aptheker illustrates the suspicion with which Texans held Tejanos in the panic following a discovered slave conspiracy in 1856:
- “Many of the Mexican inhabitants of the region were declared to be implicated, and it was felt ‘that the lower class of the Mexican population are incendiaries in any country where slaves are held.’ They were arrested and and ordered to leave the country within five days and never to return ‘under the penalty of death.’”
- From Herbert Aptheker, American Negro Slave Revolts (New York: International Publishers, 1993) p346
- “Many of the Mexican inhabitants of the region were declared to be implicated, and it was felt ‘that the lower class of the Mexican population are incendiaries in any country where slaves are held.’ They were arrested and and ordered to leave the country within five days and never to return ‘under the penalty of death.’”
- For more on the created dangers of migration across the US-Mexico border, see:
- Brian’s article on Jacobin, “A War in the Desert” (2018)
- Margaret Regan, The Death of Josseline: Immigration Stories from the Arizona Borderlands (2010)
- Jason De León, The Land of Open Graves: Living and Dying on the Migrant Trail
- On the conduct of the Texas Rangers in the Mexican war. From Justin Smith’s The War with Mexico, Vol II (1919), p212-213
- “The chief criminals were the Texans, who felt that barbarities committed by the Mexican on their soil during the revolution warranted the cruelest retaliation. At Matamoros they had been the fiercest of the volunteers, and now – stationed for a while at the town – they found a still better opportunity… To say nothing of robberies and minor outrages perpetrated ‘in the broad light of day,’ it was thought, noted a regular officer in his diary, that not less than one hundred Mexicans were slain in cold blood, and out of about 7000 still in town, 5000, more or less, fled. A citizen cannot take his hat off, wrote a Mexican, without some American’s saying, ‘That is mine’; and if the owner denies it, he gets a bullet.”
- Smith then tries to salvage the reputation of the American military’s conduct, “To a large extent, if we leave the Texans out of the account, the Mexicans themselves were responsible for the worst outrages of Monterey and the vicinity.”
- On desertion during the Mexican War, see:
- “It comes as no surprise to find that the desertion rate was the highest of any American foreign war and double that of the Vietnam War.” From Robert Miller, Shamrock and Sword: The Saint Patrick’s Battalion in the US-Mexican War (1989), p173.
- If you want to deep dive on the types of people who settled in Texas, see Cormac McCarthy’s novel Blood Meridian (1985)
- Harsha Walia wrote on Texas and US imperialism in chapter 1 of Border and Rule (2021)
- Closing quote is from Grandin’s The End of the Myth, p 95&98
EP 6 – Resistance and Abolition
- Opening quote was from the preamble of David Walker, David Walker’s Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World (1829). Walker’s Appeal was an unprecedented exposé on the horrors of slavery and call for the institution’s immediate abolition by any means necessary.
- William Lloyd Garrison’s The Liberator began publication on January 1st 1831 and became a firebrand abolitionist newspaper around the time of the Mexican War. For a collection of articles opposing the Mexican War, typical of The Liberator, see here.
- For more on the formation of the Republican Party, see: William Gienapp, *The Origins of the Republican Party, 1852-1856* (1987)
- Delegates to the New England Workingmen’s Association in 1846 prefigured Marx’s famous formulation in Capital by two decades, resolving that “American slavery must be uprooted before the elevation sought by the laboring classes can be effected.” In chapter 10 of Capital Vol 1, Marx notes: “In the United States of North America, every independent movement of the workers was paralysed so long as slavery disfigured a part of the Republic. Labour cannot emancipate itself in the white skin where in the black it is branded. But out of the death of slavery a new life at once arose. The first fruit of the Civil War was the eight hours’ agitation.”
- For more on the labor movement and slavery during this period see: Philip Foner, “From Slavery to Freedom” in Organized Labor & the Black Worker, 1619-1981 (1981)
- John Brown is a very important and fascinating abolitionist to study. His spiritually driven, unconditional love for humanity is something to be admired and emulated. For more on Brown see:
- W. E. B. Du Bois wrote a fantastic biography, John Brown (1909)
- Lerone Bennett Jr, “God’s Angry Man” in Ebony, 1964
- Contemporary Reactions to John Brown’s Raid
- For more on the Civil War and the slave rebellion:
- We cannot stress enough how essential W. E. B. Du Bois’ *Black Reconstruction in America 1860-1880 (1935) is to understand this critical time period. For this episode, read chapter 4 “The General Strike” to get a full detail of direct actions slaves took during the civil war. As with all of this book, it is very illuminating and fun to read.
- Historian David Williams’ fantastic book *A People’s History of the Civil War* (2005) which focuses on details of the Civil War.
- For a catalogue of slave revolts in the United States, see Herbert Aptheker’s American Negro Slave Revolts (1943)
- For a discussion of slave revolts in colonial America, see Eugene Genovese’s From Rebellion to Revolution: Afro-American Slave Revolts in the Making of the Modern World (1979)
- For the changing views of slavery and the Civil War, both North and South, see:
- Chandra Manning, *What This Cruel War Was Over* (2007)
- Paul Escott, After Secession: Jefferson Davis and the Failure of Confederate Nationalism (1992) and The Confederacy: The Slaveholders’ Failed Venture (2010)
- Closing quote from Chandra Manning’s book *What This Cruel War Was Over* (2007), p213
EP 7 – America’s Worst President w/ Matt Christman
- This wide-ranging discussion is meant to listened to alongside chapter 6 of End of the Myth
- Check out Matt’s Hell of Presidents episodes on Andrew Johnson: ep 5 “But How Was the Play?” and ep 6 “The Handsome Generals”
- For more on Andrew Johnson, see:
- WEB Dubois, “Transubstantiation of a Poor White” in Black Reconstruction in America 1860-1880 (1935)
EP 8 – The Real West w/ Richard White
- This wide-ranging discussion is meant to listened to alongside chapter 7 of End of the Myth
- We also discuss Richard White’s books:
- Also check out California Exposures: Envisioning Myth and History, a book of photography by Jesse Amble White with commentary by Richard White on the transformation of the West and the creation of California.
EP 9 – The Pact of 1898
- This wide-ranging discussion is meant to listened to alongside chapter 8 of End of the Myth
- Intro Quotes:
- The Senator Beveridge quote is taken from Stephen Kinzer’s Overthrow
- The excerpt from a poem appearing in the Atlanta Constitution is quoted in End of the Myth, p135
- The quote from Frederick Douglass is from his 1875 Fourth of July Address
- The New Vibe
- Josiah Strong, Our Country (1885)
- The discussion of football and ruling class masculinity is from chapter 2: “Rough Riding” in Dave Zirin, A People’s History of Sports in the United States (2009)
- Teddy Roosevelt, The Winning of the West, Book 3, Chapter 2: “The Indian Wars” (1888)
- Daniel Immerwahr’s comments on Alfred Thayer Mahan are in How to Hide an Empire, Chapter 4: “Teddy Roosevelt’s Very Good Day” (2019)
- The Spanish-American War
- The account of events in Cuba comes mostly from Stephen Kinzer, Overthrow, Chapter 2: “Bound for Goo-Goo Land” (2006)
- Discussion of the invasion and occupation of the Philippines comes from:
- Bruce Cummings, Dominion from Sea to Sea, Chapter 5 “Abroad in Search of Monsters to Destroy” (2009)
- Paul Kramer, The Blood of Government, Chapter 2: “The Philippine-American War as Race War” (2006)
- Alfred McCoy, Policing America’s Empire, Chapter 5: “Constabulary Covert Operations” (2009)
- The Reunion of North and South
- For the changing climate around celebrating the Confederacy, see William Blair, Cities of the Dead (2011)
- Dixie Day at the AYPE
- Seattle Times quoted in History Link, “Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition in Seattle Celebrates Dixie Day on August 24, 1909,” 10/6/2008
- Marjorie Ann Reeves, A Chapter in Pacific Northwest History: United Daughters of the Confederacy (2006), p6-14.
- For the story on Dianne Feinstein and the Confederate Flag, see The Dollop Ep 330 “Feinstein and the Flag”
- To gaze into the abyss that is Ed Murray’s brain, see Seattle Times, “Seattle Mayor Ed Murray Calls for the Removal of Confederate Monument, Lenin Statue,” 8/23/2017
- Comments at the meeting of the United Spanish War Veterans: Proceedings of the United Spanish War Veterans (1931)
- Racism in the Philippine war and occupation
- Paul Kramer, The Blood of Government, Chapter 2: “The Philippine-American War as Race War” (2006)
- Racism against black troops in Florida in William Gatewood, “Black Troops in Florida During the Spanish American War,” Tampa Bay History (1998)
- Racism in the Occupation of Haiti, see Noam Chomsky, *Year 501, The Conquest Continues, Chapter 8: “The Tragedy of Haiti” (1993)
- Closing Quote
- Closing quote is from Grandin’s The End of the Myth, p 146
EP 10 – What’s so Progressive About Eras, Anyway?
- The intro quotes come from Jeffrey Isaac, et al. “The Poverty of Progressivism” & “Responses” in Dissent Magazine (Fall 1996).
- 1996 Election cycle
- For an example of Clinton flummoxing Republicans by running on their platform, see: NYT, “Seizing the Crime Issue, Clinton Blurs Party Lines,” 8/1/1996
- For more on the Clintons’ race-baiting see: Nathan Robinson, Super Predator (2016)
- On liberals “new nationalism,” see: John Judis and Michael Lind, “For a New Nationalism,” in The New Republic (March 26, 1995)
- Steven Diner quote about the Progressive Era from: Steven Diner, A Very Different Age (1998), p222-223
- A historiography of Progressivism
- On historians difficulty with defining Progressivism, see:
- Peter Filene, “An Obituary for ‘The Progressive Movement,’” American Quarterly, Vol. 22 No. 1 (Spring 1970).
- Post-war histories
- Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform (1955); George Mowry The California Progressives (1951); Daniel Boorstin, The Genius of American Politics (1953); Arthur Link, Woodrow Wilson and the Progressive Era (1954).
- These are the best New Left histories that we would suggest reading to understand the era
- Gabriel Kolko’s The Triumph of Conservatism (1963); James Weinstein, *The Corporate Ideal in the Liberal State* (1968); Robert Wiebe’s The Search for Order (1967).
- Robert Johnston’s dogshit book is The Radical Middle Class (2003). Johnston sums up his view on politics as: “Americans are, and will likely always be, firmly attached to most of the institutional components of a market economy… There are, many middle-class Americans believe, no alternatives to capitalism.” (p268-269)
- On historians difficulty with defining Progressivism, see:
- The three elements of Progressivism
- The rise of the railroad corporation:
- Richard White, Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America (2011)
- The rise of the professional managerial class
- Robert Wiebe, The Search for Order (1967)
- For an excellent look at how professional training create professional politics, see: Jeff Schmidt, Disciplined Minds (2001)
- The rise of the administerial state
- Gabriel Kolko, *The Triumph of Conservatism* (1963)
- Gabriel Kolko, Railroads and Regulation, 1877-1916 (1965)
- James Weinstein, The Corporate Ideal in the Liberal State (1968)
- The study that Brian mentions about democratic input into the American political system is: Martin Gilens & Benjamin Page, “Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens,” Perspectives on Politics, Vol 12 No 3 (September 2014)
- See also, Brian’s article, “Behemoth,” on how capital rules the political system on Mechanical Freak
- The rise of the railroad corporation:
- Elihu Root
- A short bio of Root from historian Alfred McCoy can be found in the article “Barack Obama is a Foreign Policy Grandmaster,” in The Nation, 9/15/2015
- For a longer discussion, see: Warren Zimmerman, First Great Triumph (2004)
- Listen to our discussion with historian Mary Anne Henderson about tuberculosis and Progressive Era Seattle here
- James Weinstein quote about the “false consciousness of American liberalism” from The Corporate Ideal in the Liberal State, p xi
- On the false image of Progressive Era reform:
- Teddy Roosevelt’s myth as a trustbuster is best exposed in Kolko’s The Triumph of Conservatism
- The story of the Meat Inspection Act of 1906 and the Federal Reserve Act are both taken from Kolko’s The Triumph of Conservatism, p98-112 & p217-254
- For an excellent book from the interwar years on the connection between liberalism and fascism, see: Rajani Palme Dutt, Fascism and Social Revolution, (1934)
- Closing quote from: James Weinstein, The Corporate Ideal in the Liberal State, p x, 254
EP 10.5 – It’s the Friends We Made Along the Way
- For more on slave rebellions in the United States, see:
- Herbert Aptheker, American Negro Slave Revolts (1943)
- Douglas Egerton, Gabriel’s Rebellion (1993)
- For more on the history of the indigenous population of the United States, see:
- Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz, An Indigenous People’s History of the United States (2015)
- Ward Churchill, A Little Matter of Genocide: Holocaust and Denial in the Americas 1492 to the Present (2001)
- For more on Indian Removal and the case for labeling it a genocide, read Ward Churchill’s essay “‘Nits Make Lice’: The Extermination of North American Indians, 1607-1996”
- And in the Americas generally: David Stannard, *American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World* (1992)
- Genocide of indigenous Americans leading to climate change:
- The Guardian, “European Colonization of Americas Killed so Many it Cooled Earth’s Climate,” 1/31/2019.
- Alexander Koch, et al, “Earth System Impacts of the European Arrival and Great Dying in the Americas After 1492” in Qaternary Science Reviews, Vol 207 (March 2019)
- On Filibustering
- Irish-Americans trying to invade Canada: The Dollop EP 106, “The Fenian Raids”
- On the evolving definitions of sexuality
- George Chauncey, Gay New York (2008)
- Gary Atkins, Gay Seattle (2013)
- On the British occupation of India, see:
- Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts (2000)
- Chapter 2 “The Indian Case History” in Frederick Clairmonte, Economic Liberalism and Underdevelopment, (1960)
- Noam Chomsky on British occupation of India: “Robert Clive’s forces were outnumbered by about 10 to 1 at the crucial battle of 1757 that opened the way to the takeover of Bengal by the East India Company, setting the stage for the British conquest of all of India. Bengal was the richest area—so extraordinarily rich, in fact, that the British merchant adventurers and conquerors were amazed by its wealth. India itself was the commercial and manufacturing center of the world in the 18th century. It was, for example, producing more iron than all of Europe. It’s striking that over the centuries extraordinarily rich and productive areas have become the very symbols of hopelessness and despair—such as Bangladesh and Calcutta. That’s a typical feature of European conquest, which says a lot about the legacy of, in this case, small wars, from the point of view of the conquerors.” (Rogue States [South End Press, 2000], p159-160)
- Michael Parenti on imperialism: “Third World poverty, called ‘underdevelopment,’ is treated by most Western observers as an original historic condition. We are asked to believe that it always existed, that poor countries are poor because their lands have always been infertile or their people underproductive. In fact, the lands of Asia, Africa, and Latin America have long produced great treasures of foods, minerals, and other natural resources. That is why Europeans went through so much trouble to steal and plunder them. One does not go to poor places for self-enrichment. The Third World is rich. Only its people are poor – and it is because of the pillage they have endured.” (Against Empire [City Light Books, 1995], p7)
- Book Recommendations
- Munya:
- Richard White, The Republic for Which it Stands, (2017)
- Eric Foner, Reconstruction (1988)
- Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian (1985)
- Brian:
- Sven Beckert, The Monied Metropolis (2001)
- Howard Fast, Freedom Road (1944)
- Munya:
EP 11 – The Nadir of Race Relations pt 1
- Intro quote is from Richard Boyer & Herbert Morais, Labor’s Untold Story, p38-43
- Discussion of the labor movement pulled from:
- Philip Foner, History of the Labor Movement in the United States, Vol. 1 (1947)
- Philip Foner, History of the Labor Movement in the United States, Vol. 2 (1955)
- Richard Boyer & Herbert Morais, Labor’s Untold Story (1955)
- Sven Beckert, The Monied Metropolis (2001)
- Philip Dray, There is Power in a Union, (2010)
- For more on the 1877 Railroad Strike see:
- Philip Foner, “The Great Strikes of 1877” from History of the Labor Movement in the United States, Vol. 2
- Richard Boyer & Herbert Morais, “Give Them a Rifle Diet,” from Labor’s Untold Story
- For more on violence against labor, see:
- The Ludlow Massacre: Philip Foner, “Revolt of the Miners” from History of the Labor Movement, Vol. 2
- The Everett Massacre: Robert Tyler, “A Harvest of Violence” from Rebels of the Woods (1967)
- Discussion of black civil rights taken from:
- Leon Litwack, Trouble in Mind (1999)
- Philip Foner, Organized Labor & the Black Worker, 1619-1981 (1981)
- Philip Dray, At the Hands of Persons Unknown, (2003)
- WEB Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, (1903)
- Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Mob Rule in New Orleans, (1900)
- For more on the Thibodeaux Massacre, see:
- Calvin Schermerhorn, “The Thibodaux Massacre Left 60 African-Americans Dead and Spelled the End of Unionized Farm Labor in the South for Decades,” Smithsonian Magazine, 11/21/2017
- John DeSantis, The Thibodaux Massacre: Racial Violence and the 1887 Sugar Cane Labor Strike (2016)
- For more on the history of lynching, see:
- Leon Litwack, “Hellhounds” from Trouble in Mind
- Equal Justice Initiative, *Lynching in Ameria: Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror, 3rd Ed (2017)
- For more on the early AFL and the treatment of black workers, see:
- Philip Foner, “The AFL & the Black Worker” from Organized Labor & the Black Worker
- Du Bois quote on the AFL and black workers from:
- WEB Du Bois, “A Field for Socialists,” New Review (Jan. 11, 1913): 54–57
- Discussion of sundown towns taken from:
- James Loewen, Sundown Towns, (2005)
- See James Loewen’s “How Sundown Towns Were Created”
- NYT, “Negroes Driven Away,” 7/14/1902
- Listen to the “Sundown Towns” episode of Texas Sucks for a discussion of the continued relevance of sundown towns today
- James Loewen, Sundown Towns, (2005)
- For some examples of restrictive covenants in the Seattle area, see:
- Discussion of the Panic of 1873 and its consequences taken from:
- Richard White, “Panic” from The Republic for Which it Stands (2017)
- WEB Du Bois, “Counter-Revolution of Property” from *Black Reconstruction* (1935)
- For more on the destruction of black wealth during the Obama Admin, see: People’s Police Project, “Foreclosed: Destruction of Black Wealth During the Obama Presidency,” 2017
- Closing Quote from WEB Du Bois, “Counter-Revolution of Property” from Black Reconstruction (1935) p600-601
EP 11 – The Nadir of Race Relations pt 2
- This wide-ranging discussion is meant to listened to alongside chapter 9 of End of the Myth
- Intro Quote is from End of the Myth, p166
- Account of Tacoma’s 1885 pogrom against its Chinese population taken from:
- Jean Pfaelzer, Driven Out: The Forgotten War Against Chinese Americans (2008)
- “The Tacoma Method,” in Overland Monthly and Out West Magazine, March 1886.
- Accounts of Chinese labor and the Chinese Exclusion Act taken from:
- Richard White, The Republic for Which it Stands (2017)
- Andrew Gyory, Closing the Gate: Race, Politics, and the Chinese Exclusion Act (1998), quote taken from p254-256.
- Discussion of eugenics taken from:
- Edwin Black, War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America’s Campaign to Create a Master Race (2003)
- Account of El Paso Bath Riots taken from:
- Alexandra Minna Stern, “Buildings, Boundaries, and Blood: Medicalization and Nation Building on the US-Mexico Border, 1910-1930,” in Hispanic American Historical Review, Vol 79 No. 1 (Feb 1999).
- Claude Pierce, “Combating Typhus Fever on the Mexican Border” in Public Health Reports (1896-1970), Vol. 32 No. 12 (March 23, 1917)
- Also, see: The Dollop, EP 272 – The Bath Riots
- For more on public health, race, and exclusion in the Progressive Era, see:
- In Los Angeles: Emily Abel, *Tuberculosis and the Politics of Exclusion* (2006)
- In San Francisco: Nayan Shah, *Contagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San Francisco’s Chinatown* (2001)
- In Seattle: Mechanical Freak Presents “The White Plague”
- Michael Willrich, Pox: An American History (2012)
- Account of violence in the Rio Grande Valley taken from:
- Benjamin Johnson, “The Plan de San Diego Uprising and the Making of the Modern Texas-Mexican Borderlands,” in Continental Crossroads (2004)
- For more on racist violence and the Texas Rangers, see:
- Julian Samora, Joe Bernal, & Albert Peña’s Gunpowder Justice: A Reassessment of the Texas Rangers (1979)
- The Senate hearing investigating the Rangers was in 1919: Proceedings of the Joint Committee of the Texas Senate and the House in Investigating the Texas Rangers
- Monica Munoz Martinez, The Injustice Never Leaves You: Anti-Mexican Violence in Texas (2018)
- Refusing to Forget
- Julian Samora, Joe Bernal, & Albert Peña’s Gunpowder Justice: A Reassessment of the Texas Rangers (1979)
- Account of the Mexican Revolution taken from:
- Greg Grandin, chapter 9 of The End of the Myth
- Benjamin Keen & Keith Haynes, A History of Latin America Vol. 2 (7th edition), quote comes from p293-294.
- For more on the Mexican Revolution, see the Revolutions podcast’s 27 part series on the Mexican Revolution
- For more on the Plan de San Diego, see:
- James Sandos, A Rebellion in the Borderlands: Anarchism and the Plan of San Diego, 1904-1923 (1992)
- Charles Harris & Louis Sadler, “The Plan of San Diego and the Mexican-United States War Crisis of 1916: A Reexamination,” in The Hispanic American Historical Review, Vol 58, No 3 (Aug 1978).
- Discussion of the KKK taken from:
- Kenneth T Jackson, The Ku Klux Klan in the City, 1915-1930 (1967)
- The Seattle Civil Rights & Labor History Project, “The Ku Klux Klan in Washington State”
- See also:
- The Dollop, EP 221 - Oregon and the Ku Klux Klan
- OC Weekly, “Anaheim’s Racist-as-Hell History Beyond the KKK, and Why OC Weekly Covers It,” 3/2/2016
- Brian Platt, “Why You Should Support the Anti-Klan Protesters in Anaheim,” Counterpunch, 3/2/2016.
- Discussion of the 1924 Immigration Act taken from:
- Edwin Black, War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America’s Campaign to Create a Master Race (2003)
- Debra Kaufman, Gerald Herman, James Ross, and David Phillips, eds., From the Protocols of the Elders of Zion to Holocaust Denial Trials (2007)
- For more on Henry Ford and the relationship between anticommunism and antisemitism, see our Christmas Bonus Episode
- Discussion of the creation of the Border Patrol taken from:
- Kelly Lytle Hernandez, Migra! A History of the US Border Patrol (2010)
- Monica Munoz Martinez, The Injustice Never Leaves You: Anti-Mexican Violence in Texas (2018)
- For more on the connections between the US and Nazi Germany, see:
- Edwin Black, *War Against the Weak* (2003)
- Edwin Black, IBM and the Holocaust (2001)
- Edwin Black, Nazi Nexus (2009)
- Nazi document, presented at Nuremberg, showing the influence of the US eugenics movement on the Nazi “race hygiene” laws
- For the post-war relationship, see:
- Eric Lichtblau, The Nazis Next Door (2014)
- Ronald Smelser & Edward Davies II, The Myth of the Eastern Front (2007)
- For more on Drug Laws and anti-Chinese sentiment, see:
- Alex Vitale, The End of Policing (2017)
- Quote on the border as theater taken from:
- Miguel Antonio Levario, Militarizing the Border, p3
- Closing quote from Grandin’s The End of the Myth, p166-167.
- Closing song, Drive by Truckers, “Ramon Casiano”
EP 12 – The Politics of Travel w/ Ryan Archibald
- Ryan’s unpublished dissertation is available through the University of Washington library system and is called Travelling Dissent: Activists, Borders, and the US National Security State (2019)
- For more on the politics of travel, see:
- Sam Lebovic, "No Right to Leave the Nation: The Politics of Passport Denial and the Rise of the National Security State" in Studies in American Political Development, Vol. 34 No. 1 (April 2020)
- Jeffrey Kahn, Mrs. Shipley's Ghost: The Right to Travel and Terrorist Watch Lists (2013).
- Moshik Temkin, "American Internationalists in France and the Politics of Travel Control in the Era of Vietnam" in Outside In: The Transnational Circuitry of US History, eds. Andrew Preston and Douglas C. Rossinow (2017)
- Timothy H. Lovelace, Jr., "Willam Worthy's Passport: Travel Restrictions and the Cold War Struggle for Civil and Human Rights," in Journal of American History, Vol. 103 No. 1 (June 2016)
- For more on the surveillance of workers, radicals, and immigrants in the US, see:
- Christian Parenti, The Soft Cage: Surveillance in America from Slavery to the War on Terror (2004)
- For more on social movements, internationalism and travel, see:
- Judy Tzu-Chun Wu, Radicals on the Road: Internationalism, Orientalism, and Feminism during the Vietnam Era (2013)
- Robeson Taj Frazier, The East is Black: Cold War China in the Black Radical Imagination (2015)
- Teishan Latner, Cuban Revolution in America: Havana and the Making of a United States Left, 1968-1992 (2018)
- Sean L. Malloy, *Out of Oakland: Black Panther Party Internationalism during the Cold War* (2017)
- For more on Progressive Labor and the Student Committee for Travel to Cuba, see:
- New York Times, “59 US Students Start a Visit to Cuba, Defying Washington,” 7/1/1963
- New York Times, “50 Students Back from Cuba; House Anti-Red Panel Calls 10,” 8/30/1963
- Columbia Daily Spectator, “American Students’ Trip to Cuba Creates Furor,” 9/26/1963
- New Cuba: The Story of 84 Young American Workers and Students Who Defied the US State Department’s Travel Ban and Toured Cuba as Written by the Students Themselves (1964)
- “The Student Committee for Travel to Cuba Comments,” in Progressive Labor (Dec. 1964)
- Toru Umezaki, “Breaking Through the Cane-Curtain: The Cuban Revolution and the Emergence of New York’s Radical Youth, 1961-1965,” in The Japanese Journal of American Studies No. 18 (2007)
EP 13 – The Interwar Years
- Episode 13 & 14 are meant to be listened to along with Chapter 10 of The End of the Myth
- Intro quote is from Labor’s Untold Story, p 203
- For more on the financial windfall from WWI, see:
- “World War I and the Great 1925-1929 Speculative Bubble” in Kevin Phillips, Wealth and Democracy: A Political History of the American Rich (2003)
- “Self Help in Hard Times” in Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States (1980)
- On the Red Scare, see:
- “War is the Health of the State” in Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States (1980)
- “Closing the American Mind: The Early Years” in Alex Carey, Taking the Risk Out of Democracy (1997)
- On the imprisonment of “disorderly women” during WWI in Seattle, see
- Nancy Moore Rockafellar, Making the World Safe for the Soldiers of Democracy: Patriotism, Public Health and Venereal Disease Control on the West Coast 1910–1919, PhD Dissertation (1990)
- For elsewhere in the US: Scott Wasserman Stern, “The Long American Plan: The US Government’s Campaign Against Venereal Disease and Its Carriers,” in Harvard Journal of Law & Gender, Vol. 38 No. 2 (2015)
- On the connection between the occupation of the Philippines and the Red Scare, FBI, and J Edgar Hoover, see:
- “President Wilson’s Surveillance State” in Alfred McCoy, Policing America’s Empire (2009)
- For conditions for labor and capital in the 1920s and 1930s, see:
- “The Golden Insanity” in Richard Boyer & Herbert Morais, Labor’s Untold Story
- “Grapes of Wrath” in Richard Boyer & Herbert Morais, Labor’s Untold Story
- “World War I and the Great 1925-1929 Speculative Bubble” in Kevin Phillips, Wealth and Democracy: A Political History of the American Rich (2003)
- “Self Help in Hard Times” in Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States (1980)
- The Third International and the role of black labor in the US, see:
- “The Black Question” from The Fourth Congress of the Third International, 11/30/1922
- New York Times articles about workers fighting evictions:
- NYT, “Reds Fight Police in Bronx Evictions,” 2/2/1932
- NYT, “1,500 Fight Police to Aid Rent Strike,” 2/27/1932
- Black labor organizing in the South
- Robin DG Kelley, Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression (1990)
- Michael Honey, Southern Labor and Black Civil Rights: Organizing Memphis Workers (1993)
- American capital’s fascination with Mussolini
- NYT, “The Three the World Watches,” 8/12/1934
- John Diggins, “Flirtation with Fascism: American Pragmatic Liberals and Mussolini’s Italy,” in The American Historical Review, Vol. 71 No. 2 (Jan. 1966)
- James Whitman. “Of Corporatism, Fascism, and the First New Deal,” in The American Journal of Comparative Law, Vol. 39 No. 4 (Autumn 1991)
- For more on corporate and private support for fascism in the US, see the work of Edwin Black:
- Edwin Black, *War Against the Weak* (2003)
- Edwin Black, IBM and the Holocaust (2001)
- Edwin Black, Nazi Nexus (2009)
- For the continued fascination with fascism, see: David Leonhardt, “Stimulus Thinking and Nuance,” NYT, 3/31/2009
- Sexism in the creation Old Age Insurance, see:
- Alice Kessler-Harris, “Designing Women and Old Fools,” in US History as Women’s History: New Feminist Essays, eds. Linda K Kerber, Alice Kessler-Harris, and Karhyn Kish Sklar (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1995)
- Closing Quote from Labor’s Untold Story, p327-328
EP 14 – A Psychological Twist
- Intro Quote taken from Greg Grandin’s The End of the Myth, p 168.
- The discussion in this episode focuses on:
- Chapter 10 – A Psychological Twist from Grandin’s The End of the Myth
- Chapters 1-4 from Rajani Palme Dutt’s Fascism and Social Revolution (1934)
- Dilip Bose, “Rajani Palme Dutt – Great Son of the Indian People”
- Outro Quote from R Palme Dutt’s Fascism and Social Revolution, p 62 (p42 in the 1935 ed)
EP 15 – The Truman Show w/ Justin Roll
- Intro quote is from Labor’s Untold Story, p 330-332
- Check out History Sucks’ deep dive into the 1944 DNC and the Truman presidency here and its bibliography here
- For more on the American strategy in Europe and the treatment of the Nazis post-war, see:
- Gabriel Kolko, The Politics of War: The World and United States Foreign Policy, 1943-1945 (1968)
- Joyce & Gabriel Kolko, The Limits of Power: The World and US Foreign Policy, 1945-1954 (1973)
- David Reynolds, From World War to Cold War: Churchill, Roosevelt, and the International History of the 1940s (2006)
- Regarding Displaced Persons Camps after the war, very little has been written on this subject. For a brief discussion, see: NYT, “Surviving the Nazis, Only to be Jailed by America,” 2/7/2015 & John Loftus, The Belarus Secret (1982)
- For treatment of the Nazis after the war, see:
- Eric Lichtblau, The Nazis Next Door: How America Became a Safe Haven for Hitler’s Men (2014)
- Ronald Smelser & Edward Davies, The Myth of the Eastern Front: The Nazi-Soviet War in American Popular Culture (2007)
- Covert operations in Europe post-WWII, see:
- William Blum, Killing Hope: US Military and Soviet Interventions Since WWII (2004)
- William Blum, The CIA: A Forgotten History (1986)
- Daniele Gasner, NATO’s Secret Armies: Operation Gladio and Terrorism in Western Europe (2005)
- The Radio War Nerd podcast also did several episodes on the “Years of Lead” in Italy that are very good, but unfortunately, they are behind a paywall. Radio War Nerd, Ep 135, Ep 136, Ep 139
- Readings on the decision to use nuclear weapons against Japan:
- Gar Alperovitz, The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb (1996)
- If you don’t want to read a 900 page book, Alperovitz gave a lecture in 1994 that lays out his basic thesis, a transcript of which can be found here
- Stanley Goldberg, “Racing to the Finish: The Decision to Bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki,” in The Journal of American-East Asian Relations, Vol. 4 No. 2 (Summer 1995)
- John Hersey, Hiroshima (1946)
- James Weingartner, “Trophies of War: US Troops and the Mutilation of Japanese War Dead, 1941-1945,” in The Pacific Historical ReviewI, Vol. 61 No. 1 (Feb. 1992)
- John Dower, War Without Mercy: Race & Power in the Pacific War (1986)
- Gar Alperovitz, The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb (1996)
- Readings on the US and Asia in the Cold War
- Chalmers Johnson, Okinawa: Cold War Island (1999)
- Marilyn Young, The Vietnam Wars, 1945-1990 (1991)
- Readings on the Korean War and subsequent occupation of South Korea:
- Bruce Cummings, The Korean War (2011)
- Bruce Cummings, Korea’s Place in the Sun: A Modern History (1997)
- Bruce Cummings, North Korea, Another Country (2004)
- The journalism of Tim Shorrock
EP 15.5 – Talking Truman Show w/ Justin Roll
- For more on labor in the Post-WWII United States, see:
- Chapters 2&3 in Mike Davis, Prisoners of the American Dream: Politics and Economy in the History of the US Working Class (1986)
- Chapter 11 in Richard Boyer & Herbert Morais, Labor’s Untold Story (1955)
- Chapter 9 in Philip Dray, There is Power in a Union (2010)
- On Henry Wallace:
- Wallace’s “Century of the Common Man” speech
- Oliver Stone’s idealist take on Wallace can be found in Episode 2 of his series The Untold History of the United States
- The Oliver Stone interview that we mention can be found here
- A quick note on the institutions of the American security state and their role in domestic politics, just a week after recording this discussion the ACLU reported another revelation of a CIA program to spy on the electronic communications of millions of Americans.
- White Light/Black Rain: The Destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, documentary (2007)
- Notes on Korea:
- For some interesting articles on the origins of the “Brainwashing” myth, see:
- Marcia Holmes, “Edward Hunter and the Origins of ‘Brainwashing’” in Hidden Persuasions, 5/26/2017
- Ryan Mitchell, “China and the Political Myth of ‘Brainwashing’” in Made in China Journal, Vol. 4 No. 3 (July-September 2019)
- Description of US occupation, see:
- Bruce Cummings, The Korean War (2011)
- Bruce Cummings, Korea’s Place in the Sun: A Modern History (1997)
- Discussion of “comfort women,” see:
- JoongAng Daily, “Former Sex Workers in Fight for Compensation,” 10/30/2008
- NYT, “Ex-Prostitutes Say South Korea and US Enabled Sex Trade Near Bases,” 1/7/2009
- Brian Platt, “Sexual Violence is a Trademark of Imperialism,” in Counterpunch, 4/13/2015
- For more on the US conflict with Russia over Ukraine see:
- Trueanon “Ep 205 – Ukraine w/ Mark Ames, pt 1,” 2/7/2022
- Trueanon “Ep 206 – Ukraine w/ Mark Ames, pt 2,” 2/8/2022
- The Mechanical Freak episode about organizing at Starbucks can be found here and you can donate to the Starbucks Strike Fund here and sign the petition to support striking workers here.
- For some interesting articles on the origins of the “Brainwashing” myth, see:
EP 16 – In the Bretton Woods w/ Richard Wolff
- Intro clip is from Richard Wolff’s regular Patreon series Ask Dr. Wolff titled “Capitalism Depends on Empire” (12/1/2021)
- Richard Wolff hosts a weekly show, Economic Update, where he covers economic issues through a Marxist lens
- You can follow Prof. Wolff’s work at Democracy at Work, which is an excellent resource for info on economics, the labor movement, and how capitalism functions. Support this work by becoming a patron on Patreon or donating to Democracy at Work directly.
- Prof. Wolff’s latest book is The Sickness is the System about the intersection between capitalism in crisis and the Covid pandemic
- For more on the shaping of the post-WWII economic order, see “Planning for Peace” in Gabriel Kolko’s The Politics of War: The World and US Foreign Policy, 1943-1945 (1968)
- For more on the dissolution of Bretton Woods and the rise of dollar hegemony, see Matias Vernango, “The Consolidation of Dollar Hegemony After the Collapse of Bretton Woods” in Review of Political Economy, Vol. 33 No. 4 (2021)
EP 16.5 – More Q&A!
- For more on the effects of Spanish Flu and Covid among vulnerable populations, see:
- For the public health impact of the Spanish Flu, see: Laura Spinney, Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How it Changed the World (2018)
- On the effects of the Spanish Flu in India, see:
- Ajai Sreevatsan, MintPress, “Why 1918 Matters in India’s Corona War,” 3/13/2020
- For more on the public health impacts of British colonialism in India, see: Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts (2000)
- For Mike Davis’ discussion of the dangers of Avian Flu, see: Mike Davis, The Monster at Our Door (2005)
- For the effects of Covid 19 on vulnerable populations in the US, see:
- Johns Hopkins University HUB, “New Data Shows Covid 19’s Disproportionate Impact on American Indian, Alaska Native Tribes,” 10/11/2021
- CDC Newsroom, “CDC Data Show Disproportionate COVID 19 Impact in American Indian/Alaska Native Populations,” 8/19/2020
- Maritza Vasquez Reyes, “The Disproportional Impact of COVID 19 on African Americans” in Health and Human Rights Journal, Vol 22 No 2 (Dec 2020).
- US Census Bureau, “COVID-19 Pandemic Hit Black Households Harder Than White Households, Even When Pre-Pandemic Socio-Economic Disparities Are Taken Into Account,” 7/21/2021
- For an interesting write-up on the Business Plot, see:
- Jonathan Katz, Rolling Stone, “The Plot Against American Democracy That Isn’t Taught in Schools,” 1/1/2022
- For an interesting write-up on Louisiana Senator Huey Long, see:
- Jonah Walters, Jacobin, “Kingfish Down,” 9/16/2015
- The movie that Brian mentions is a fictional portrayal based on Huey Long called, All the King’s Men (1949) based on the novel of the same name.
- US actions in WWII
- The Gabriel Kolko book that Brian mentions that blames US reluctance to invade mainland Europe on the British is The Politics of War: The World and United States Foreign Policy, 1943-1945 (1968). You can read the relevant section from the book here.
- On the flipside, for a history of the Eastern Front where the bulk of the fighting was done, see Alexander Werth’s excellent Russia at War, 1941-1945 (1965)
- For more on the US and de-Nazification, see:
- Ronald Smelser & Edward Davies II, The Myth of the Eastern Front: The Nazi-Soviet War in American Popular Culture (2007)
- Eric Lichtblau, The Nazis Next Door: How America Became a Safe Haven for Hitler’s Men (2014)
- The movie that Brian mentioned is Judgement at Nuremberg (1961)
- Check out Episode 17 of Ending the Myth coming soon!
- What is wrong with academia?
- Here is a good starting point: Ellen Schrecker, No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities (1986)
- On the role of anthropology in imperialism, see:
- Ben White, “Professional Blindness and Missing the Mark,” in the Rozenberg Quarterly Magazine
- David Price, Cold War Anthropology: The CIA, the Pentagon, and the Growth of Dual Use Anthropology (2016)
- Also check out Jeff Schmidt, Disciplined Minds: A Critical Look at Salaried Professionals and the Soul-Battering System that Shapes Their Lives (2000)
- Check out Episode 17 of Ending the Myth coming soon!
- Book Recommendations:
- Munya
- Michael Parenti, Blackshirts & Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism (1997)
- Richard Lachmann, Fist Class Passengers on a Sinking Ship (2020)
- Robin DG Kelley, Hammer & Hoe (1990)
- Brian
- Gabriel Kolko, The Triumph of Conservatism (1962)
- Bruce Cummings, The Korean War (2010)
- Munya
EP 17 – The New Red Scare
- In this episode we begin our two part discussion of the Cold War meant to be listened to alongside reading Chapter 11 of Greg Grandin’s The End of the Myth
- Opening quote taken from G William Domhoff, Who Rules America: The Triumph of the Corporate Rich, 7th Ed. (2014), p72-73.
- The story about the “Win a Future” contest comes from Chapter 7: “The Commodity Gap: Consumerism and the Modern Home” in Elaine Tyler May’s *Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era* (1988)
- Elite Reaction to the New Deal:
- Alex Carey, Taking the Risk Out of Democracy (1997), Pt 1 “Closing the American Mind”
- List of NAM activities in 1936, from Richard Boyer & Herbert Morais, Labor’s Untold Story (1955)
- You can see some examples of the NAM’s “Uncle Abner” cartoons here, truly the Ben Garrison’s of their time
- For more on the post-war business offensive against the New Deal, see:
- Elizabeth Fones-Wolf, Selling Free Enterprise: The Business Assault on Labor and Liberalism, 1945-1960 (1994)
- Kim Phillips-Fein, Invisible Hands: The Businessmen’s Crusade Against the New Deal (2010)
- For more on the John Birch Society, see:
- Rick Perlstein, *Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus* (2009)
- Robert Welch, Blue Book of the John Birch Society (1959), This is a transcription of Robert Welch’s speeches from the founding meeting of the JBS
- For more on General Electric’s efforts to break the United Electrical Workers (UE), see:
- Kim Phillips-Fein, Invisible Hands: The Businessmen’s Crusade Against the New Deal, Ch 5: “How to Break a Union”
- For more on McCarthyism and its effects on American society, see:
- Ellen Schrecker, Many are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America (1999)
- For more on the Cold War and Hollywood, see:
- Michael Parenti, Make Believe Media: The Politics of Entertainment (1991), Ch 3: “The Media Fight the Red Menace”
- Nora Sayre, Running Time: The Films of the Cold War (1982)
- Tom Engelhardt, “Ambush at Kamikaze Pass” in Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars (Winter-Spring, 1971)
- On the Cold War and the art world, see:
- Frances Stonor Saunders, The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters (1999)
- The Timothy Brennan quote on the class origins of aesthetics is taken from his excellent book, Wars of Position: The Cultural Politics of Left and Right (2007), p57.
- For a not-so-critical look at how jazz was used to combat the racist reality of Jim Crow internationally, see: Penny Von Eschen, *Satchmo Blows Up the World: Jazz Ambassadors Play the Cold War* (2006)
- Frances Stonor Saunders, The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters (1999)
- On the Cold War and academia, see:
- Ellen Schrecker, No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities (1986)
- For more on the rehabilitation of Nazism during the Cold War, see:
- Eric Lichtblau, The Nazis Next Door: How America Became a Safe Haven for Hitler’s Men (2014)
- Ronald Smelser & Edward Davies III, The Myth of the Eastern Front: The Nazi-Soviet War in American Popular Culture (2008)
- Richard Breitman, et al, US Intelligence and the Nazis (2005)
- Douglas Tottle, Fraud, Famine and Fascism: The Ukrainian Genocide Myth from Hitler to Harvard (1987), Ch 4 “Black Deeds”
- George Kennan quote on Stalin’s “Asiatic nature” taken from: George Kennan, Russia and the West Under Lenin and Stalin (1961), p248
- For more on COINTELPRO, see:
- Ward Churchill & Jim Vander Wall, The COINTELPRO Papers: Documents from the FBI’s Secret Wars Against Dissent in the United States (1990)
- Closing quote from:
- Elizabeth Fones-Wolf, Selling Free Enterprise: The Business Assault on Labor and Liberalism, 1945-1960 (1994), p285-287
EP 17.5 – Discussing the New Cold War
- This episode is a discussion of topics brought up in EP 17 – The New Red Scare, so make sure to go back and listen to that episode if you haven’t already
- For more on Atoms for Peace and the US nuclear program, see:
- Alex Wellerstein, Restricted Data: The History of Nuclear Secrecy in the United States (2021)
- Dee Garrison, Bracing for Armageddon: Why Civil Defense Never Worked ()
- Leonard Weiss, “Atoms for Peace,” in Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Vol. 59 No. 6 (Nov/Dec 2003)
- For more on the suburbs and anticommunism, see:
- Chapter 7: “The Commodity Gap: Consumerism and the Modern Home” in Elaine Tyler May’s *Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era* (1988)
- Segment Break
- US National Archives, “Walt Builds a Family Fallout Shelter” (1960)
- Art
- On the CIA and abstract expressionism
- Frances Stonor Saunders, The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters (1999)
- MOMA and Met boards
- Both museums have boards that would raise eyebrows, with the MET counting David Koch and Henry Kissinger among its Trustees Emeriti and the MOMA counting Leon Black (try googling his name plus “Epstein” for fun) and Alice Tisch (who doubles on the MET board) as board members and David Rockefeller as a lifetime trustee. A closer examination of these two boards would reveal a who’s-who of the NYC capitalist class who either hold seats directly or fill them with their fail-sons and fail-daughters.
- Sociologist G. William Domhoff has been tracing the American ruling class through corporate boards and charitable foundations for the past 50 years through new editions of his book Who Rules America.
- Critique of EO Wilson
- RC Lewontin, “Sociobiology: Another Biological Determinism” in International Journal of Health Services, Vol. 10 No. 3 (1980)
- On the CIA and abstract expressionism
- Segment Break
- The Kinks, “Art Lover” (1981)
- Wendover Productions, “The Art Market is a Scam (and Rich People Run It)”
- The Rehabilitation of Nazism
- You can find screencaps of the comments from Michael McFaul and Anders Aslund here
- For more on Anders Aslund’s adventures in Russia in the 1990s, listen to our episode on the fall of the Soviet Union and check out Dan Josefsson’s excellent article: "Shock Therapy: The Art of Ruining a Country" (4/1/1999)
- For a comparison between “The Lost Cause” mythology of the Dunning School and the rehabilitation of the Nazis, see:
- Ronald Smelser & Edward Davies III, The Myth of the Eastern Front: The Nazi-Soviet War in American Popular Culture (2008), CH 3 – “The Cold War and the Emergence of a Lost Cause Mythology”
- On the troubling rise of turning Nazis into national heroes, see:
- Kristen Ghodsee, “Venerating Nazis to Vilify Commies,” in Red Hangover: Legacies of 20th Century Communism (2017)
- Daina Eglitis & Michael Kelso, “Why Are So Many Eastern Europeans Suddenly Celebrating Nazi Collaborators?” Zocalo, 5/29/2019
- Jana Tsoneva, “Never Forget What the Fascists Did,” Jacobin, 10/9/2019
- AP, “Latvian Musical on Nazi Collaborator Stirs Anger,” 10/30/2014
- David Broder, “The End of Anti-Fascism,” Jacobin, 9/27/2019
- Ronan Burtenshaw, “Fascism’s Face-Lift,” Jacobin, 12/5/2017
- SPLC Intelligence Report, "Night at the Museum: A Controversial Historian at the Holocaust Museum," Winter 2009.
- The Guardian, "Communism May be Dead, But Clearly Not Dead Enough," 2/16/06
- You can find screencaps of the comments from Michael McFaul and Anders Aslund here