Seeing Red: Liberalism, Communism, and the Black Struggle for Human Rights

Carol Anderson , Eyes Off the Prize: The United Nations and the African American Struggle for Human Rights, 1944–1955 . New York : Cambridge University Press , 2003 . 290 pp.     

Mobilizing Manhood: Gender and the Great Strike in Australia and Aotearoa/New Zealand

The Great Strike of 1890 in Australia and New Zealand symbolized the rise of class, influenced nationalist discourse, and shaped labour politics. It also signified a crisis in gender relations. Conservatives and unionists openly contested the meaning of masculinity, mobilizing concepts of manhood in ways specific to class, community, ethnicity and age. Both groups were alarmed by the role women played in the dispute; attacks on scabs and special constables and the occupation of public, ‘male’ spaces challenged ascribed boundaries, customs and locales, and revived a rich tradition of pre-industrial protest.     

The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation

Journalism, it has been said, is the first rough draft of history. In The Race Beat, Pulitzer prizewinning journalists Gene Robertsand Hank Klibanoff have come as close as anyone could to a final,definitive draft of the history of the role of the press inthe civil rights movement. Their research is exhaustive andtheir writing is compelling, resulting in a book that readslike a hybrid: part scholarly treatise and suspense novel, partadventure tale and Greek tragedy. It sets the scene with a detailed and informative history ofthe Negro press in the U.S., long predating the     

Labor resistance and municipal power: Scalar mismatch in the Los Angeles Green New Deal

In 2019, the Mayor of Los Angeles announced the Los Angeles Green New Deal (LAGND), an ambitious plan to shift the city's power system to 100% renewables by 2045. The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP)—the electricity provider for the city and the largest municipally-owned utility in the United States—began a consultation process with local stakeholders and energy system modelers to determine possible scenarios to accomplish this goal. While the LAGND was lauded by environmentalists and progressives both within Los Angeles and beyond, it has been heavily opposed by the IBEW 18, the union that represents nearly all employees at LADWP. IBEW 18 has staged protests, created political advocacy organizations, and funded anti-decarbonization political candidates. This paper draws on 20 semi-structured interviews and other secondary materials to understand the union's oppositionand to demonstrate some of the unique challenges that municipal-scale Green New Deal (GND) plans face. We argue that the tensions between the mayor's office and unionized utility workers can be explained, at least in part, by three instances of scalar misalignment—or mismatch—that arise from trying to undertake a GND plan at the city level. These include mismatch between: (1) the scales of political activism and engagement between the mayor and the union, (2) the aims of the GND narrative and the limits imposed by the jurisdiction of the City of Los Angeles, and (3) the current and future geographies of the electric power system and related infrastructure and its path dependencies.