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Customers find the tone great and the book shines a light on a dark period of US history. They also describe the reading experience as terrific, skillful, and captivating. Readers praise the content as beautifully written and deeply researched. They appreciate the excellent background on tainted part of US History.
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Customers find the book a terrific, masterfully written, and easy read that lays out the genesis of American threats to the world. They also say the author does a very good job capturing the time period and relationship in an honest, skillful, and captivating way.
"...Adam Hochschild has written a marvellous book ...." Read more
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Customers find the book's content beautifully written, deeply researched, and interesting. They also say the lessons are stark and indelible, and the book introduces readers to little-known American defenders of democracy.
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Customers find the tone of the book great, illuminating, and beautifully written. They also say it shines a needed light on a dark period of US history.
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Customers find the book insightful, saying it does an outstanding job of showing one of America's most controversial and important historical moments. They also say the parallels are easy to see from then to present day.
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The 1917-21 period encompassing US entry into an international “Great War” and capped by the domestic Red Scare surrounding the conflict’s end – bringing heightened repression of political dissidents -- has had a pernicious effect right up to today on progressive and socialist activism, Adam Hochschild concludes in his focused account of the era in American Midnight (Mariner Books/HarperCollins, 2022).
Subtitled “The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy’s Forgotten Crisis,” Hochschild’s study lays out month by month and year by year the Wilson administration’s multipronged attack on left, labor, civil and human rights and free speech access, scapegoating “anti-Americanism” in many political, ethnic and cultural versions of The Other. By Hochschild’s persuasive account, effects of that half-decade’s intense repression continue to undermine any robust US democracy. Fueled by public officials, the era’s divisions left the political landscape barren and sterilized into two-party dominance until the persistent economic inequality of the 1920s led to the depression of the ‘30s and impetus for the New Deal’s improved landscape for dissident organizations. Patterns for future repression were refined, and continue to evolve today.
This five-year episode is tucked, sometimes overlooked, in the long calendar of US repression and resistance that begins with the end of the Civil War and establishment of nominal (male) equality with the end of legal enslavement. It coincides with the US entry into the Great War already under way in Europe and a rapid, unnerving rise of public paranoia about what “American” should mean. In the historical background was the steady drumbeat of social and economic inequality through the Gilded Age and the response of workers with sometimes-violent struggle throughout the 1870s, ‘80s and ‘90s. In harness with overall inequality was the elaboration of the Jim Crow system from South to North.
The Wilson administration federalized and empowered – in the name of national security and with the infamous Espionage Act (1917) and Sedition Act (1918) – regional supremacists’ individual and collective prejudices and fears about an “Other.” The Espionage Act banned speaking against US participation in the Great War; the Sedition Act (an amendment to the Espionage Act) criminalized speaking against the US, or its symbols. The “threat” that brought passage of the two acts was homogenized from ingredients such as Black flight from the sharecropper quasi-slavery in the South, immigrants overrepresented in industries like coal and steel, and left formations like the Socialist Party.
Hochschild’s American Midnight gives this five-year outbreak of fear and savagery the compact, focused and granular account it deserves to reinforce the era’s part in what is the real American exceptionalism – the recurring episodes of public paranoia and reaction, in this instance skillfully fanned by a fascinating and repellent cast of high and low characters whose racist, sexist and nativist sentiments left a permanent and scarring imprint.
But why enter the war, so far away?
Hochschild notes that persistent German advances had by 1917 raised the specter of US allies’ actually losing to Germany. So Wilson and corporate types also grew aware that if France and England lost, their massive debts to US banks would not get paid. Hence, Wilson’s campaign slogan “he kept us out of war” was quickly sidetracked in favor of Wilson’s (prayerful, as always) request to Congress for a declaration of war.
The forces of resistance were, as usual, scattered. The Socialist Party, despite Eugene Debs’ popularity, diminished itself, splitting off two communist parties after the 1917 Bolshevik victory in Russia. That event, in itself, also frightened the powerful money men of Wilson’s government. The Bolsheviks’ peace treaty with Germany freed up whole divisions of their Eastern troops to join the fight in France and Belgium, which put a possible German victory on the table.
The Civil War was just fifty years ended, strong in memories, and many of the powerful actors in the Red Scare were sons of veterans. More recently, the US’s actions following the end of the Spanish-American War included the savage repression of Philippine indigenous resistance by a succession of military governments in the decade before Wilson took office. Fresh from brutal repression overseas, the US military was primed to support an imagined “Americanism” at home.
So, with official help, the “enemies of Americanism” were easily grouped and isolated: Wobblies, socialists, women leading independent lives, union organizers (mostly industrial), Blacks (especially in the North), Catholics, immigrants and anyone with an accent, especially one that could be imagined as German. In echoes of today, a large but shrinking white, male, nominally Christian power structure was ripe to be frightened about change.
Egged on by officials like A. Mitchell Palmer, the attorney general who provided the label for the Palmer Raids of 1920 (and had his eye on a presidential campaign) and his youthful investigative chief J. Edgar Hoover, US citizens were encouraged and empowered to mobilize their fear and hatred for what they perceived as “different” from their majority-white, Protestant selves into often violent action.
Hochschild keeps his focus on the Red Scare associated with US entry into the Great War and its aftermath, and seldom projects that period’s features into the future. The term “McCarthyism” is absent. But for the reader there is no mistaking the symmetries when an officially sanctioned “atmosphere of free-floating paranoia” enabled tribal-majoritarian groups to form and act out/act on their own prejudices, resulting in the rapid erosion of norms of political and social behavior.
By sticking methodically to the five-year period of war fever, burning xenophobia capped by the Red Scare, and attempted mass deportation and “cleansing” of a white-supremacist populace, Hochschild rewards the reader with a close understanding of the important lesson: how easily a complacent but increasingly uneasy majority can be turned against not only an imagined foreign threat but their neighbors and community.
The book introduces us, for instance, to the widespread chapters of the American Protective League and its evolution from promoting war bonds (to both enrich and protect the banks) to actively carrying out vigilante attacks on unions, political organizations and “suspicious” individuals. It provides vivid lessons about how official permission for this behavior can push many beyond the norms and constraints of everyday life they might otherwise observe.
American Midnight includes career through-lines involving many players besides Wilson, who is characterized as idealistic to the point of overlooking the actions of his own administration (though he had a direct hand in re-segregating the civil service, reversing what had been a positive development). On the official side, Postmaster General Albert Burleson as a personal project barred radical periodicals from the mailstream, ignored Wilson’s hints to lighten up, and continued after Wilson left office. Free thought, in the pre-electronic era, flowed through the mails, and Burleson’s refusal to allow socialist publications to flow through the postal service was automatic, going so far as to intercept press between SP offices.
Political censorship of periodical mail, sanctioned by the courts, didn’t end till Warren Harding’s new postal chief, Will Hays, took over in 1921. For far-flung, dispersed US radicals it was the equivalent of closing schools during the Pandemic.
During the Red Scare years, Washington state Congressman Albert Johnson was a constant Congressional agitator on immigrants, even those already legally in the US, as a degraded and dangerous sector of the public. Hochschild, in a rare comparison across eras, calls Johnson “a voice not unlike those who flocked to the Tea Party a century later: the voice of a white, rural or small-town America profoundly unsettled by change, and change that seemed embodied in people who looked or sounded different.”
Through the Red Scare half-decade, Johnson was a major player in whipping up existing public prejudices like his own into anti-immigrant violence. He ushered in the severe restriction of immigration (except from Norther Europe) through the Johnson-Reed Immigration Act, which was referenced in a diary that would become Mein Kampf. (Even during the next World War, the act famously excluded refugees from the Holocaust.) He urged mass deportation of union organizers, socialists and (alleged) anarchists and other perceived enemies of Americanism. He was one of many officials giving the wider public permission to turn its fears and dislikes into active violence.
Also prominent on the “Americanism” front was another presidential aspirant, Gen. Leonard Wood, who had been a particularly brutal military governor of the southern Philippines, oppressing a mostly Islamic population and the Moro rebels. On his return, pinned down with US training commands while his fellow generals were leading US troops in Europe, Wood kept a high profile by declaring martial law and occupying cities like Omaha or Gary, Ind. or West Virginia coal country, where strikes had turned violent.
As Hochschild shows, the Philippine military expedition provided many behind-the-scenes actors as well, like antisocialist Ralph Van Deman and antisemite John B. Trevor, both military intelligence officers who, back in the US, were detailed to keep an eye on US activities and gained favor through their individual enthusiasms. As Hochschild says, “the violence of the Philippine War came back to haunt the United States.”
Also making Zelig-like appearances in this frequently entertaining book is Leo Wendell (AKA “Walsh”), who made a career of infiltrating left-labor formations in Pittsburgh and elsewhere and arranging to be arrested by the Bureau of Investigation (his employers) often enough to keep his radical cred with fellow workers.
The Palmer Raids took place in November of 1919, in a national-crisis atmosphere of cascading postwar strikes, as union leaders pushed for gains and for penalties for war profiteers. Huge numbers of “suspicious” people and organizations were netted, a mass of potential deportees.
Almost humorously, a massively publicized prediction of revolutionary violence pegged to May Day 1920 left Palmer and Hoover high and dry when “nothing happened.” Major newspapers, which till then had published Palmer and Hoover’s every paranoid effusion, felt “taken for a ride” and were early defectors from the Red Scare bandwagon.
As with Trump’s short reign, democratic values held on in unexpected parts of officialdom.
Louis Post, an undersecretary of Labor with a foot in Henry George’s near-socialist camp, found himself in charge of the department as his superiors were absent and suddenly became the official to make the call on thousands of pending deportation cases. Careful and well-documented analysis found about 80 percent of them defective due to bad or no warrants, and he tossed them out, bringing screams from Rep. Johnson and his anti-immigrant allies in Congress. Post was investigated by a House committee in preparation for his impeachment. But he defended himself before the committee with such wit and skill that (after the popped balloon of the May Day 1920 non-insurrection) Congress abandoned its quest. Post had a wide network of support in and out of government, strong PR savvy and knew well where to pull the strings, but Hochschild suggests his skill at covering his tracks is one reason his important role is less widely known.
The trope of labor organizing as foreign and disloyal was already well engrained and easily turned majoritarian unease into violence. The above-mentioned American Protective League, the KKK for the new era of war fever, was created by a PR specialist in cahoots with Army Intelligence and gave men beyond draft age an organization and identity (with badges) that “deputized” them as enforcers of Americanism and would loosen their behavioral norms.
Many nervous majoritarian cultures before and since have extruded the same white-collar mob behavior enabled by officialdom. We are seeing this today —political violence in the US is, Reuters reports , reaching new highs.
In parallel, as frequently happens, is the contradiction of information control and its opposite, unconstrained rumor.
Wilson created the Committee for Public Information less than two weeks after he asked Congress for a declaration of war November 2, and veteran newsman George Creel was tapped to lead it. With Creel’s CPI, the US took the world stage on a wave of chauvinism and propaganda. The level of falsehood from officials, echoed in a compliant Hollywood’s implausible plots about conspiracy, brought a diminished public respect for truth per se, an eerie forecast of the Trump era – one newsman noted wonderingly “the force of an idea lies in its inspirational value. It matters very little whether it is true or false.” Meanwhile racist mob violence repeatedly flared up around the country fueled, in many instances, by rumor.
To counter the top-down promotion of the US as saviors of democracy, resistance came from well-known political figures like Eugene Debs and other Socialist Party members as well as more passively from the proposed cannon fodder themselves. Though not radical, many draft-age men proved reluctant to fight on foreign shores. Hochschild tots up 338,000 men who registered for the draft but failed to show for induction – “in those pre-electronic days, of course, it was easy to drop from sight.” Those who did not, but registered as conscientious objectors, could anticipate miserable treatment at the hands of military authorities. Gen. Wood, who was put to running a midwestern basic training camp instead of the swashbuckling leadership of troops in Europe he felt was his due, also had charge of all the COs at his camp and abused them openly.
Those who didn’t show up for induction couldn’t drop from sight as easily as they would like because the ever-vigilant American Protective League conducted huge sweeps in public gatherings and grabbed those who couldn’t show a draft card.
Touring the country trying to speak out against the war, other socialist leaders along with Debs risked jail for violating the Espionage Act ban on discouraging the war effort. Some, like Debs, were convicted and sentenced to prison. Like many socialists in the US and especially Europe, the celebrated Kate Richards O’Hare found the fact of workers fighting workers “a shattering blow.” After sharing prison life with Emma Goldman (they were fast comrades) she was released and toured the country arguing Debs should be released, but Warren Harding waited until Christmas Day 1921 to do so. Goldman, finally found deportable, was expelled from the country she had come to love despite its politics.
The Socialist Party received special attention from others, including the rabid war hawk Theodore Roosevelt, because their activism was largely channeled into electoral work, which he found particularly dangerous. Five years of sustained repression dealt a “shattering blow” to the fortunes of the party. As Hochschild observes in his final chapter, “the party that had once elected 33 state legislators, 79 mayors and well over 1,000 city council members and other municipal officials [and drawn almost a million votes for a presidential candidate who was in prison] had shrunk to less than 10,000 members nationwide.”
As the war ended Wilson, who by John Maynard Keynes’s account had arrived in Paris with lofty speeches but “no plan at all” for concrete peace, failed to talk Lloyd George and Clemenceau out of demanding savage reparations by Germany. John Maynard Keynes, a British peace delegate, forecast the disaster that took place. Worse still, since no fighting took place in Germany and German propaganda and censorship were so massively imposed, “tens of millions of Germans did not believe their country had actually lost the war” – another disastrous deviation from reality that would lead to Hitler’s rise.
Republican candidate Harding campaigned on “normalcy” in the 1920 election. The public’s urge to be done with the Red Scare era partially illustrated by his 26-point margin of victory, which remains the widest in a presidential race since before the Civil War. His postmaster general, Will Hays, ended Burleson’s freewheeling censorship. Harding, after his death, had an off-the-record comment released by a reporter: “Let’s not kid ourselves. Debs was right. We should never have gone to war.”
It seems likely that without US intervention in WWI the political landscape of Europe would have been significantly different as the 1920s began. But the war not only cost millions of lives (multiplied by the flu epidemic that wartime travel and travail doubtless spread) but, as Hochschild impressively demonstrates, badly damaged democratic possibilities in the US and gave the powerful a test bench for future forms of repression. Woodrow Wilson, “the inspirational idealist abroad,” failed as a peacemaker even as he proved “the nativist autocrat at home.” The Sedition Act was stripped from the Espionage Act soon after the war ended, but the Espionage Act remains, a threat to truthtellers today.
Adam hochschild. mariner, $29.99 (432p) isbn 978-0-358-45546-2.
Reviewed on: 08/30/2022
Genre: Nonfiction
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Brendan’s alternate tagline for american midnight:.
All was not fine on the home front.
A look at the American home front around the time of World War I.
On June 5, 1917, all eligible men were required to register for the draft. Although there were concerns on how many would do so, nearly 10 million did so.
So much food was needed for the war effort that meatpacking companies saw their profits soar over 400%.
It’s hard to review a book which has so many positive attributes but has one major and fatal flaw. The review becomes even harder when the author is Adam Hochschild who wrote one of the best books I have ever read, King Leopold’s Ghost.
The positives of American Midnight are considerable. Hochschild has chosen a very interesting time in American history and has put the focus on an often-ignored part of World War I, the home front. Specifically, he focuses on the unions and war opponents. As you would expect from an exceptional author, the history is sound, the prose is easy to read, and extremely interesting people are highlighted. There is a lot to like about this book and its story.
However, I could not get passed the fatal flaw of this book which is Hochschild’s clear bias when wading through this history. This is not a hidden bias as Hoschschild makes it clear in the prologue what he is going to present and why he is doing so. I have no problem with his theses and often, I was very much in agreement with his observations.
However, the bias can get to the point where it is significantly distracting even when you agree with the author (and I agreed with a good amount of Hochschild’s point of view). An example is when Hochschild mentions a military member (who he is clearly not a fan of) complimenting the Confederate flag. While this is certainly something we would analyze today if a public figure made such pronouncements, mentioning this specific event in 1917 is clearly a manipulative tactic. It would not have been strange to hear or see something like that in 1917, but today it is a hot button item. The history is sound as I have no doubt Hochschild is reporting the truth. However, the choice to include this is clearly meant to inflame today’s reader with something not inflammatory in its own time. To make this choice even more jarring, this particular passage is followed soon after by a positive presentation of someone who was implicated in an attempted murder.
Ultimately, it becomes a question of how distracting you find things like the examples I have mentioned above. History is told from a point of view and there is no way around that. However, these episodes proved too blatant and repeated for me to enjoy the rest of the book which is quite good. If you can glide past such episodes better than I can, then you will enjoy it immensely.
(This book was provided to me as an advance copy by Netgalley and Mariner Books.)
There is a lot to like, but it may lean too hard one way for some readers. Buy it here!
Brendan Dowd
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This book cover image released by Norton shows “Kent State: An American Tragedy” by Brian VanDeMark. (Norton via AP)
More than a half century has passed since Ohio National Guard members opened fire on college students during a war protest at Kent State University , killing four students and injuring nine others.
The description of the nation, then split over the Vietnam War, leading up to the 1970 tragedy echo today’s politics and divisions in many ways. In “Kent State: An American Tragedy,” historian Brian VanDeMark recounts a country that had split into two warring camps that would not and could not understand each other.
“It was a tense, suspicious, and combustible atmosphere that required only a spark to ignite a tragedy,” VanDeMark writes.
VanDeMark succeeds at helping readers understand that atmosphere, creating a chilling narrative of the spark and ensuing tragedy at Kent State. Within less than 13 seconds, 30 guardsmen fired 67 shots at protesters in an event where “the Vietnam War came home and the Sixties came to an end,” he writes.
With a straightforward writing style, VanDeMark provides both a micro and macro look at the events leading up to the massacre — examining the growing dissent against the U.S. involvement in Vietnam and how it rippled across Kent State’s campus.
VanDeMark relies on a host of new material, including interviews with some of the guardsmen, to reconstruct the protests on campus and the shooting. He also recounts the investigations and legal fights that ensued following the shooting.
“Kent State” portrays a campus that grappled for years with its legacy, with no official memorial to the slain students erected on campus until two decades later, in 1990. A new visitors center devoted to the shooting that opened in 2012 suggested an emerging consensus about the tragedy, writes VanDeMark, whose work may contribute to that consensus as well.
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“People feel differently about their bookstore than they do about their grocery store or electronics store,” writes Evan Friss, in praise of a retail ritual battered by the internet.
By Alexandra Jacobs
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THE BOOKSHOP: A History of the American Bookstore, by Evan Friss
We all know of food deserts : landscapes where there’s no access to fresh produce, just a Taco Bell or two. Less fretted over are the book barrens .
It is now possible to visit many places in our great democracy and not come anywhere close to a bookstore. (Public libraries are hanging in there — for now — though younger people overwhelmingly experience them through smartphones .)
Of course, along with bulk orders of Folgers and Cottonelle, one can order many exciting titles to be delivered cheaply — overnight even! — from this amazing online entity named for a river in South America. Perhaps you’ve heard of it. …
Grossly inadequate, asserts Evan Friss, a historian and husband to a former clerk at Manhattan’s Three Lives, in “The Bookshop,” a spirited defense of this important, odd and odds-defying American retail category. (He previously has written about bicycles, another common good that needs more support.)
A book about bookstores risks being a gag, like Kramer’s coffee-table book about coffee tables . It seems assured placement up front with the tote bags, mugs and other impulse merch that shops stock in order to pad their often dismal profit margins.
And yet there have been many engrossing memoirs by booksellers, most recently by Paul Yamazaki of the fabled City Lights in San Francisco, and another from the antiquarian Marius Kociejowski . Nor should one overlook the epistolary classic 84, Charing Cross Road, by Helene Hanff.
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Can our country’s dark past teach us anything about its dark present?
The title American Midnight : The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy’s Forgotten Crisis promises to instruct us that the cruel distempers of our times have happened before and that, if we pay attention, we will learn important lessons. And author Adam Hochschild has written wonderful books about other midnights in human history, including King Leopold’s Ghost (European exploitation of the Congo) and Bury the Chains (fighting the transatlantic slave trade). So, yes, attention should be paid.
In American Midnight, the darkness extends from 1917 to 1921. In Hochschild’s telling, the United States plunges into the madness of World War I, emerges more violent and hate-filled, and then recovers its bearings.
Culprits are exposed and castigated, with President Woodrow Wilson at the top of the list. Close behind is a toxic partnership between an attorney general who would be president (A. Mitchell Palmer) and an amoral, media-savvy policeman (young J. Edgar Hoover). Vigilantism runs amok as mobs and the government target union activists, immigrants, dissenters against the war effort, socialists, and African Americans.
Hochschild has a sharp eye for personalities and moments. His renderings of radical firebrand Emma Goldman and socialist leader Kate Richards O’Hare are compelling and three-dimensional. The description of an evening when prison officials barred O’Hare’s teenaged son from playing his trumpet for his jailed mother is perfect. And the portrait of Wilson as fundamentally feckless and bored by public administration — even before his debilitating stroke in autumn 1919 — is disturbing and persuasive.
As a narrative of troubled times, American Midnight shines. Its ambition to instruct us, however, may be an ambition too great.
It is no matter of national pride that other eras have featured comparable darkness. Coordinated violence against labor organizers, the newly arrived, war resisters, minorities, and leftists has recurred far too often. Comparable episodes include the Know-Nothing movement of the 1850s; repression against war dissenters on both sides of the Civil War and during the Vietnam era; the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II; and intermittent “Red Scares” and union “massacres” and “wars” between the 1870s and the 1940s. Lamentably, public and private violence against African Americans and Native Americans has been nearly constant.
In American Midnight , the evil fevers afflicting the nation subside during the 1920 presidential election. Both Democrats and Republicans turn away from frontrunners promising more social anger and repression, choosing instead lightly known candidates of milder disposition: James Cox and Warren Harding. The affable Harding’s victory brings a few thieves into the White House but no crusaders against leftists or Black people. Why did the fevers break?
Hochschild stresses two episodes in 1920 when Attorney General Palmer’s brutal methods were criticized — by an obscure acting secretary of labor (Louis Post) and by a blue-ribbon panel of legal poohbahs (in today’s parlance, “elites”). Were those enough to transform the public mind and bring peace to the valley? Maybe, but there had been plenty of similar criticism before, which Hochschild describes. Perhaps Americans just grew weary of being angry.
Beyond the era covered by American Midnight is the disappointment that the 1920s proved to be no festival of brotherhood. The Ku Klux Klan flourished in many states, even electing a Klansman governor of Oklahoma. Lynchings continued at a steady pace. Federal courts and bureaucrats hammered labor when it dared to organize and strike. The Johnson-Reed Act of 1924, detailed by Hochschild, shut down much immigration for the next two generations.
So, what’s the lesson for today? How do we accelerate the end of such midnights, or even prevent them from happening? The takeaway may be that every period has its midnight, replete with angry populist movements and craven political leaders, and the people of that era must resolve to banish that darkness — or at least to wait it out.
David O. Stewart has written two historical novels set during the period of American Midnight ( The Paris Deception and The Babe Ruth Deception ) and five works of history.
Support the Independent by purchasing this title via our affliate links: Amazon.com Or through Bookshop.org
Book Review in Non-Fiction More
By gillian t.w. ahlgren.
By marty crump.
Twelve months of fresh facts and quirky celebrations await in the author’s annual handbook.
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My husband and I took a business-class flight on Qatar Airways that included a nine-hour layover in Doha.
Our business-class ticket came with access to the Al Mourjan Garden lounge, a business travel lounge at Hamad International Airport that opened in 2023.
I was excited to check out the massive space and all of its amenities, including a quiet room where I wanted to take a nap .
Passengers flying first or business class on Qatar Airways or any other Oneworld carrier have complimentary access to the lounge. Lower-tier passengers can purchase access at the entrance.
I was worried about how busy the lounge would feel, but upon entering, I found a tranquil atmosphere.
The layout is a U-shape, and it overlooks The Orchard, the airport's lush indoor tropical garden.
One side of the lounge offers full-service and buffet dining options, including a sushi and salad station. The other side has a coffee bar, beverage station, and various seating areas.
The lounge can fit 707 passengers and is nearly 8,000 square feet.
It's filled with different seating arrangements, and I also saw family rooms, showers, a smoking room, a game room, a prayer room, a gym, a spa, quiet rooms, and private meeting rooms.
Some lounge amenities, like spa treatments , cost extra.
To get to the quiet rooms, I stopped at the area's dedicated front desk.
The rooms are first-come, first-served, and the free bookings last for six hours.
According to the airline , these spaces are designed for napping, resting, and reading. When I visited, there were 18 single rooms and six double rooms. Since it was the middle of the night, they were all full when I arrived.
I waited nearby so my travel partner and I would be first in line in case anyone left early. Thankfully, two adjacent single rooms became available after only 15 minutes.
I was hoping the room would have a cot or even a basic mattress I could lie on. Unfortunately, there was only a thin chair in a fixed reclined position. A blanket was provided but no pillow.
I wouldn't say anything else in the room could be described as cozy except for that thick, soft blanket.
The chair and environment made me feel like I was in a dentist's office. At least the lights could be turned off here, and no one was pulling teeth.
I ended up in a single room but had the opportunity to view the double. It was essentially the same, except the space was larger, and there were two chairs instead of one.
Visitors weren't allowed to eat in the rooms, but the space had a small refrigerator and complimentary bottled water.
There are no restrooms or showers in this quiet area: Those must be accessed in the main lounge.
The quiet rooms didn't feel super secure because the sliding doors to get in didn't appear to have locks, but nappers also have the option to store their luggage at a separate secure counter if they're worried.
Because the chair was immovable and designed with a curve, sleeping on my side didn't feel possible.
As a side sleeper , I eventually ended up moving to the floor to get more comfortable. I folded the blanket up several times to lie on it and used my backpack as a pillow.
I could hear some noises outside my room, but to be fair, the room is billed as "quiet," not "silent."
My room was next to a staff door I heard opening several times an hour, and the airport intercom recordings were faint but consistent. I didn't hear any conversations, phone alerts, or other more annoying sounds.
Earplugs were also provided to alleviate the noise.
After about four hours of somewhat unsatisfactory snoozing, I freshened up and rejoined the main area of the lounge.
As the sun began to rise, the light streamed through the massive lounge windows and illuminated the space.
I sat at one of the few open tables in the restaurant section of the lounge and had avocado toast with poached eggs and mimosas for breakfast.
The service in the lounge was excellent, and I loved all of the natural light.
The quiet room is a fine place to relax for six hours during a layover in Doha, but I'd tell other visitors not to expect the most comfortable sleep of their lives.
The quiet room's chair wasn't nearly as comfortable as the lie-flat seats in Qatar Airways' epic business class, where the seat is adjustable and the crew can provide a mattress pad and pillow.
If they were, I would've had a much better rest. Next time, I'd sleep more on the plane and take extra time to enjoy the lounge's other wonderful amenities.
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Transport Workers Union President Mike Quill tearing up a temporary strike-barring injunction issued by state supreme court Justice George Tilzer, New York City, 1966
On June 13 the Supreme Court once again sided with a multibillion-dollar corporation over its workers. The case of Starbucks Corp. v . McKinney concerns seven employees, now known as the Memphis Seven, whom Starbucks fired in February 2022 as they tried to unionize their store in Tennessee. (Because federal law prohibits employers from retaliating against organizing, the company naturally claims they were let go for violating workplace policies.) The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), the agency tasked with guaranteeing workers’ rights to join unions and negotiate contracts, was quick to intervene. Directed by the Biden-appointed General Counsel Jennifer Abruzzo, NLRB staff filed for a preliminary injunction to force Starbucks to reinstate the fired activists while the case was fully litigated.
Such requests are rare. The NLRB only makes them when companies glaringly violate labor law and the agency is confident that courts will decide the case in the workers’ favor. In August 2022 a lower-court judge agreed and granted the injunction.
That six-month wait for a modicum of justice was blazing speed by the standards of United States labor law. It was too fast for the Supreme Court, which, in an 8-1 decision, reversed the injunction. The justices ruled that when courts consider the NLRB’s injunction requests, rather than using a legal standard specific to labor disputes that gives the board relative deference, they must use a more restrictive standard known as “the traditional four-factor test,” as articulated in the 2008 case Winter v . Natural Resources Defense Council , Inc . Among the factors considered are the “balance of equities” (meaning that the ruling is fair to both sides) and that an injunction serves the “public interest.” Both factors are a matter of opinion. Put simply, the Court is placing its own views over the expertise of the NLRB’s professional staff, in the name of a “traditional” test that’s as old as a teenager.
The NLRB still needs to decide the case, which might take a year or more. A majority of its members—the Democrats—will likely agree that Starbucks violated the plain language of the law forbidding “discrimination in regard to hire or tenure of employment or any term or condition of employment to encourage or discourage membership in any labor organization.” When the agency returns to court for an enforcement order, the judges should rule in its favor once more, though Starbucks can appeal that decision as well.
All this delay favors employers. Union representation cases are usually won or lost in the years it takes to finish adjudicating a wrongful termination charge—the fired Starbucks workers included five of the six members of the organizing committee. Many cases are settled for cash payouts and a mutual agreement to call the matter a “resignation.” Sometimes unions trade settlements to get a company to withdraw its own charges or bargain in good faith. Starbucks is apparently negotiating under just such a brokered framework with the union, Workers United.
In one sense the consequences of Starbucks v . McKinney are relatively minor. Many Republican-leaning circuit courts were already using the four-factor test. In her partial dissent, Ketanji Brown Jackson agreed that it was the appropriate rubric but argued that it should be applied in a way that recognizes the NLRB’s authority, and that courts shouldn’t fully relitigate such cases: an “injunction request simply does not present the district court with an opportunity to wade into the midst of an ongoing labor dispute (over which it otherwise has no say) and offer its own take about how the merits should be decided.”
But in another, deeper sense, the Starbucks decision is a dispiriting sign that the courts will only allow labor rights to be revised downwards. The National Labor Relations Act, which Congress passed in 1935 to protect workers’ right to form unions and bargain collectively, may no longer be adequate to that task in a court system that has been historically pro-corporate but is especially conservative today in the aftermath of the Trump administration (though even two of the liberals, Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor, joined the Starbucks majority). In another blow to unions, on June 28 the Court, in a more nakedly partisan 6-2 vote, eviscerated the forty-year-old Chevron deference, rejecting the subject-matter expertise and statutory interpretation not just of the NLRB but of all federal regulatory agencies. How might union supporters hoping to curb inequality wrest control back from the legal system?
Judicial hostility to labor is hardly a new phenomenon. As Jackson noted in her partial dissent, “To put it bluntly, courts exercising their equitable discretion amidst labor disputes today do so against the backdrop of an ignominious history of abuse.” In his classic study, Law and the Shaping of the American Labor Movement , the historian William E. Forbath showed how, in the nineteenth century, “judge made law”—that is, legislating from the bench—forced unions to adopt an essentially conservative political strategy. 1 In an era-defining decision in the case Lochner v . New York (1905), the Court overturned a New York law limiting working hours in bakeries, arguing that the legislation interfered with the freedom to contract under the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.
As a result, in its early decades the American Federation of Labor (AFL)—the country’s largest labor organization—focused narrowly on contractual negotiations and largely gave up on state intervention as a solution to working people’s problems, except to try to prevent courts from intervening in labor disputes. When Roosevelt’s 1933 National Industrial Recovery Act tentatively endorsed collective bargaining and the right to organize, the Supreme Court overturned it using the Lochner doctrine. New York senator Robert Wagner then responded with the 1935 NLRA. That law stripped the courts of nearly all jurisdiction on cases pertaining to labor relations—essentially telling judges to keep their opinions on the subject to themselves—and created the NLRB, a parallel system of civil tribunals, which hears cases of alleged violations of workers’ rights to organize unions and go on strike. If the NLRB finds that an employer broke the law and cannot get them to comply or settle, it then and only then turns to the courts for enforcement (including injunctions). The NLRA was intended to supersede common law.
Lewis Hine/National Child Labor Committee/Library of America
A fifteen-year-old boy employed as messenger at Mackay Telegraph Company, Waco, Texas, 1913; photography by Lewis Hine
Set beside the original mandate of the NLRB, the Court’s decision in Starbucks v . McKinney couldn’t be more wrong. But the federal agency’s authority has eroded over time. In Values and Assumptions in American Labor Law , the legal scholar James B. Atleson narrated how, after the passage of the NLRA, the class biases of patrician judges led them to push back against pro-worker laws. “The belief in the inherent rights of property and the need for capital mobility, for instance, underlie certain rules,” Atleson writes, “and some decisions turn on the received superior need for continued production or the fear of employee irresponsibility.” 2 More recently, in his book The Supreme Court on Unions (2016), Julius B. Getman described how, if anything, the highest court’s historical antagonism to labor has only gotten worse in the last four decades. “What has remained constant over the years has been judicial arrogance,” he writes: “the willingness of the Court to establish factual premises for its decisions with little basis in reality.” 3
Take the right to strike, which is both specifically enumerated under the NLRA and clearly identified as one of its policy goals: “Nothing in this Act shall be construed so as either to interfere with or impede or diminish in any way the right to strike.” But this was undone just three years later in NLRB v . Mackay Radio & Telegraph Co. , a 1938 case concerning the firing of striking workers at a regional telecom firm. Justice Owen Roberts upheld strikes as protected activity, but he also made a careless aside in his decision, musing that an employer would be allowed to permanently replace his striking workers if it was necessary “to protect and continue his business.”
In the following decades, employers pressed the outer edges of Mackay : Can we offer replacement workers super-seniority protection from layoffs while strikers are not similarly protected? (No.) How about give them vacation pay that strike participants are denied? (Also no.) By the 1980s, however, their efforts turned Justice Roberts’s offhand comment into stare decisis , a disastrous precedent that held that replacing strikers and only offering them their jobs back when scabs retire is “proper under Mackay. ”
Judges also watered down the “balance of equities” protections, which were once robust enough to protect even the worst employees from retaliatory firings for union activism. Consider Walter Weigand, the subject of the landmark 1943 case Edward G. Budd Mfg. Co. v. NLRB . “If ever a workman deserved summary discharge it was he,” concluded a bemused circuit court judge. “He was under the influence of liquor while on duty. He came to work when he chose and he left the plant and his shift as he pleased.” If I’m not misinterpreting the court’s demure transcript, Weigand also ran a prostitution operation in the employer’s back alley (on company time) and testified that he had no idea what his actual job entailed. But he was only fired after switching from the boss’ company union to the more militant CIO, and for that reason the NLRB and the courts ordered him back on the job as the law intended.
But since 1980, the NLRB has applied what’s called the “ Wright Line ” standard for judging “mixed motive” terminations of union activists. It requires that a union prove that a worker was fired while engaged in protected union activity, that the employer knew the worker was a union activist, and that the employer held animus against the union. These demands in turn require more time-consuming litigation, even when an employer’s actions—like Starbucks firing people for talking to reporters about their union activism—wouldn’t pass a common-sense smell test. It’s not surprising, then, that the Wright Line standard has become a go-to union-busting weapon for employers. These days union supporters are fired in the course of nearly one in three certification votes brought before the NLRB.
An implicit assumption of the 1935 NLRA was that employers would remain neutral about organizing campaigns, and recognize a union if a clear majority of workers wanted one. But soon the Supreme Court had granted employers a First Amendment right to campaign against unionization and force employees to attend mandatory captive audience presentations. In the 1950s the NLRB fought for unions’ right to respond to these presentations, or at least mandate some access to the workplace, but since 1956 the Supreme Court has consistently supported employer’s property interests over unions’ access and speech.
Al Drago/Bloomberg/Getty Images
Senator Bernie Sanders shaking hands with fired Starbucks worker leader Jaysin Saxton, U.S. Capital, Washington, DC, 2023.
What do employers say in captive audience meetings? In 1969 Chief Justice Earl Warren allowed them to threaten that a successful union drive would lead to workplace closures or other negative effects, as long as these threats were presented as predictions “carefully phrased on the basis of objective fact to convey an employer’s belief.” In a 2009 report , the labor scholar Kate Bronfenbrenner found that between 1999 and 2003, employers threatened plant closure in 57 percent of NLRB elections, and in 15 percent of the cases they actually followed through.
In all, it took the courts roughly thirty years to take workers out of a legal environment where union organizing was a fully enforceable right—with meaningful job protections and enforcement against threats, reprisals and the refusal to negotiate—to one where certification elections are conducted under manifestly crooked rules.
While corporations aggressively worked the courts, the AFL-CIO and its think-tanks pressed for legislative reform whenever the Democrats briefly controlled the White House and both chambers of Congress. But the Democrats only pursued narrow, technical fixes: a push to ban permanent replacements under Clinton; simple proof of majority, or “card check,” certification under Obama. Even these were vigorously resisted by the business lobby and eventually killed by filibusters. Biden’s is the first Democratic administration to meaningfully use the rules in place, and the NLRB’s rule-making authority, to encourage the practice of collective bargaining.
“Of all of the members of Biden’s administration,” the Nation has gushed , it’s Abruzzo “who has brought about the most significant changes for American workers.” Under Abruzzo the NLRB has sped up the timeline for conducting union representation elections. It has also expanded the instances in which employers must accept card check certification, has tried to limit the ability of employers to conduct mandatory captive audience meetings, and stretched for “make whole” financial penalties against employers who violate their workers’ rights. Even its decision to request an injunction in the Starbucks case was part of Abruzzo’s systemwide attempt to modernize operations. (The NLRB has not yet, I’ll note in case Abruzzo is reading, restored the right to strike by revisiting the Mackay standard and forcing employers to prove that they would go out of business if not allowed to hire permanent replacements.)
And yet any of these actions can be overturned if the Supreme Court finds they violate a precedent or employers’ First or Fourteenth Amendment rights. All of them, ultimately, cry out for new lawmaking. Restoring the promise of US labor law requires amending the NLRA to override unfair court precedent and reassert the NLRB’s supremacy over judges on routine enforcement of labor violations.
It is axiomatic on the left that lawmakers do not pass such prolabor legislation until a strike wave forces them to. Yet the historical record suggests otherwise. The “right” to organize was shoehorned into the National Industrial Recovery Act —the objectively pro-business “First New Deal” legislation that the Supreme Court overturned—to gain the AFL’s support for a controversial bill. It wasn’t won through workplace action, and lacking enforcement powers, it wasn’t worth the paper it was written on. But by offering just enough to raise workers’ expectations—and more to dash their hopes—it inadvertently birthed the very militancy needed to enshrine more meaningful reform.
This argument about the effect of the NIRA is still controversial. The labor activist and scholar Eric Blanc recently cut through decades of mythmaking and crunched the numbers. He found a 129 percent increase in union membership and a 260 percent increase in workers going on strike in the months that followed the act’s enactment. In my forthcoming book, We Always Had a Union: New York’s Hotel Workers Unions, 1912-1953 , I show that the National Recovery Administration’s wage and hours code, in addition to failing to compel union recognition and reinstate fired union activists, directly caused a citywide hotel strike that the agency was attempting to mediate in January 1934. Though the unions didn’t “win” that strike, shaken hotel bosses negotiated a neutrality agreement so that the industry wouldn’t be hit with another work stoppage during the 1939 World’s Fair. The agreement resulted in the New York Hotel Trades Council , the union that remains a powerhouse in the city and state.
One lesson from this history is that unions need to be quicker to take advantage of favorable organizing environments. Today there is both a noticeable uptick of worker-led organizing (as evidenced by independent union wins at Amazon and Trader Joe’s , and wildcat job actions during the pandemic) and a pro-worker NLRB. And yet most unions are building up their savings accounts instead of spending down on new campaigns. Unions have collectively reduced their staff and organizers by an estimated 19 percent between 2010 and 2020, which translates to 23,440 fewer people that could potentially be put in the field. With the benefit of new leadership, the Teamsters and UAW are notable exceptions, joining a small handful of organizing champions like SEIU and UNITE HERE in investing significant resources on campaigns aimed at growing the labor movement, at huge employers like Volkswagen , Marriott hotels, and FedEx .
The other lesson is that opportunities for legal reform come rarely, briefly, and usually by surprise. There is no shortage of reform proposals like the PRO Act and the Clean Slate program. But too little attention is paid to counteracting judicial bias. If the Roberts Court’s judicial power grab, already a constitutional crisis, is to be met with more political brinkmanship like court-packing and Congressional overrides of politically motivated decisions, then why not center that fight on issues where judges’ historic tendency to favor corporations over workers cast them as perfect villains? Union supporters should be demanding that judges stop imposing their values and assumptions on accredited bodies like the NLRB. As the Transport Workers Union president Michael J. Quill once said of the man who sentenced him to jail for the 1966 New York City transit strike, “The judge can drop dead in his black robes .”
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Shaun Richman teaches history at SUNY Empire and is author of Tell The Bosses We’re Coming: A New Action Plan for Workers in the 21st Century .
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Historian Brian VanDeMark writes about the fatal 1970 shooting of four students by National Guard members at a war protest in “Kent State: An American Tragedy.”
More than a half century has passed since Ohio National Guard members opened fire on college students during a war protest at Kent State University , killing four students and injuring nine others.
The description of the nation, then split over the Vietnam War, leading up to the 1970 tragedy echo today's politics and divisions in many ways. In “Kent State: An American Tragedy,” historian Brian VanDeMark recounts a country that had split into two warring camps that would not and could not understand each other.
“It was a tense, suspicious, and combustible atmosphere that required only a spark to ignite a tragedy,” VanDeMark writes.
VanDeMark succeeds at helping readers understand that atmosphere, creating a chilling narrative of the spark and ensuing tragedy at Kent State. Within less than 13 seconds, 30 guardsmen fired 67 shots at protesters in an event where “the Vietnam War came home and the Sixties came to an end,” he writes.
With a straightforward writing style, VanDeMark provides both a micro and macro look at the events leading up to the massacre — examining the growing dissent against the U.S. involvement in Vietnam and how it rippled across Kent State's campus.
VanDeMark relies on a host of new material, including interviews with some of the guardsmen, to reconstruct the protests on campus and the shooting. He also recounts the investigations and legal fights that ensued following the shooting.
“Kent State” portrays a campus that grappled for years with its legacy, with no official memorial to the slain students erected on campus until two decades later, in 1990. A new visitors center devoted to the shooting that opened in 2012 suggested an emerging consensus about the tragedy, writes VanDeMark, whose work may contribute to that consensus as well.
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Adam Hochschild's new book, "American Midnight," offers a vivid account of the country during the years 1917-21, when extremism reached levels rarely rivaled in our history.
Books Book Reviews Fiction Nonfiction Summer reading How a forgotten American crisis led to democratic renewal In 'American Midnight,' Adam Hochschild revisits an era almost a century ago when ...
A history of the early-20th-century assault on civil rights and those the federal government deemed un-American. For Hochschild—the winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and Dayton Literary Peace Prize, among many other honors—one of America's darkest periods was between 1917 and 1921."Never was [the] raw underside of our national life more revealingly on display."
Adam Hochschild's American Midnight revisits the painful period of 1917 through 1921, when the United States entered World War I then, having helped to win it, plunged into a maelstrom of political violence and state repression. Hochschild (King Leopold's Ghost) turns his narrative gifts to Woodrow Wilson's quixotic effort to "make the world safe for democracy" while working to crush it at home.
Adam Hochschild's American Midnight: The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy's Forgotten Crisis is a narrative history of the repression that accompanied the United States' entry into ...
— New York Times Book Review, Editors' Choice "The post-WWI 'red scare' was the most vicious period of violent repression in U.S. history, apart from the two original sins [slavery and 'Indian removal']. The shocking story is recounted in vivid detail in Adam Hochschild's penetrating study American Midnight."
American Midnight is a "story about how a war supposedly fought to make the world safe for democracy became the excuse for a war against democracy at home." This dark period in the nation's past introduced a whole new set of characters in the cast of American history, and lifted others, though already known, to a newfound prominence.
The nation was on the brink. Mobs burned Black churches to the ground. Courts threw thousands of people into prison for opinions they voiced --- in one notable case, only in private. Self-appointed vigilantes executed tens of thousands of citizens' arrests. Some 75 newspapers and magazines were banned from the mail and forced to close. When the government stepped in, it was often to fan the ...
Mariner Books, 432 pp., $29.99. When America entered the war as the savior of this vague principle, the country's industrial might far outweighed its military capabilities. Its army was smaller ...
American Midnight: The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy's Forgotten Crisis by Adam Hochschild has an overall rating of Positive based on 11 book reviews.
American Midnight is an excellent book. Hochschild is a skillful historian, teacher, and writer. He wants readers to understand how fragile our democracy is—an especially important point to keep our focus on as we navigate the post-Trump era. "The toxic currents of racism, nativism, Red-baiting, and contempt for the rule of law have long ...
Review: Even as U.S. fought in WWI, it turned a blind eye to shameful injustices at home. Chris Vognar September 28, 2022. "American Midnight" by Adam Hochschild. Photo: Harper Collins / Mariner Books. Had "American Midnight" somehow been written in the time and place it depicts, its author would likely have been jailed, tarred and ...
This information about American Midnight was first featured in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter.Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication.
Editorial Reviews. A harrowing portrait of America in 1917-21, rife with racist violence, xenophobia and political repression abetted by the federal government. The book serves as a cautionary tale and a provocative counterpoint to our own era." ... Like all the best history books, American Midnight reads like a novel with three-dimensional ...
A book review of American Midnight by Adam Hochschild In 1912 Woodrow Wilson was an unlikely Democratic candidate for the presidency, a sometime law professor and president of Princeton who had only served in
Find helpful customer reviews and review ratings for American Midnight: The Great War, ... The book opens with the lead up to the American decision to enter the First World War and ends with the election and death of Warren Harding. ... Here AMERICAN MIDNIGHT tells the history of the four-year-long home front crises during and after the war ...
This is the subject of Adam Hochschild's latest book, American Midnight. Books in Review. American Midnight: The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy's Forgotten Crisis.
The title American Midnight: The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy's Forgotten Crisis promises to instruct us that the cruel distempers of our times have happened before and that, if we pay attention, we will learn important lessons. And author Adam Hochschild has written wonderful books about other midnights in human history, including King Leopold's Ghost (European exploitation ...
In American Midnight, award-winning historian Adam Hochschild brings alive the horrifying yet inspiring four years following the U.S. entry into the First World War, spotlighting forgotten repression while celebrating an unforgettable set of Americans who strove to fix their fractured country—and showing how their struggles still guide us today.
The 1917-21 period encompassing US entry into an international "Great War" and capped by the domestic Red Scare surrounding the conflict's end - bringing heightened repression of political dissidents -- has had a pernicious effect right up to today on progressive and socialist activism, Adam Hochschild concludes in his focused account of the era in American Midnight (Mariner Books ...
American Midnight: The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy's Forgotten Crisis Adam Hochschild. Mariner, $29.99 (432p) ISBN 978--358-45546-2
The review becomes even harder when the author is Adam Hochschild who wrote one of the best books I have ever read, King Leopold's Ghost. The positives of American Midnight are considerable. Hochschild has chosen a very interesting time in American history and has put the focus on an often-ignored part of World War I, the home front.
More than a half century has passed since Ohio National Guard members opened fire on college students during a war protest at Kent State University, killing four students and injuring nine others.. The description of the nation, then split over the Vietnam War, leading up to the 1970 tragedy echo today's politics and divisions in many ways.
Historian Brian VanDeMark writes about the fatal 1970 shooting of four students by National Guard members at a war protest in "Kent State: An American Tragedy.".
100 Best Books of the 21st Century: As voted on by 503 novelists, nonfiction writers, poets, critics and other book lovers — with a little help from the staff of The New York Times Book Review.
The title American Midnight: The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy's Forgotten Crisis promises to instruct us that the cruel distempers of our times have happened before and that, if we pay attention, we will learn important lessons. And author Adam Hochschild has written wonderful books about other midnights in human history, including King Leopold's Ghost (European exploitation ...
An icon in the shape of a lightning bolt. Impact Link My husband and I took a business-class flight on Qatar Airways that included a nine-hour layover in Doha. Our business-class ticket came with ...
On June 13 the Supreme Court once again sided with a multibillion-dollar corporation over its workers. The case of Starbucks Corp. v.McKinney concerns seven employees, now known as the Memphis Seven, whom Starbucks fired in February 2022 as they tried to unionize their store in Tennessee.(Because federal law prohibits employers from retaliating against organizing, the company naturally claims ...
Historian Brian VanDeMark writes about the fatal 1970 shooting of four students by National Guard members at a war protest in "Kent State: An American Tragedy."