In these perilous times, a grounding in history from KPFA events and interviews.
MAKING OUR WAY HOME: The Great Migration and the Black American Dream Over the course of six decades an unprecedented wave of Black Americans left the south and spread across the nation in search of a better life. This migration sparked stunning demographic and cultural changes throughout twentieth-century America. Through gripping and accessible historical narrative paired with illustrations, … Continued
The End of Ice: Bearing Witness and Finding Meaning in the Path of Climate Disruption Dahr Jamail has journeyed along many of the geographical front lines of our environmental crisis, from Alaska to Australia’s Great Barrier Reef to the Amazon rain forest, to discover the consequences of the loss of ice to nature and to humans. The … Continued
Loaded: A Disarming History of the Second Amendment. The U.S. loves guns. From Daniel Boone and Jesse James to the NRA and Seal Team 6, gun culture has colored the lore, shaped the law, and protected the market that arms the nation, and the world. In Loaded, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz peels away the sacred myths of Americans’ … Continued
Hope in the Dark, Untold Stories, Wild Possibilities When the first edition of Hope in the Dark was published in mid-2004 it gained an instant audience among serious students and progressives. This new, significantly expanded edition covers, among other things, the political territory of America and the world in recent history. Rebecca Solnit draws on her life as a writer and activist, on … Continued
The Dark Shadow of Tech on the S.F. Bay Area. Richard A. Walker is professor emeritus of geography at the University of California, Berkeley where he taught from 1975 to 2012. He has written on a diverse range of topics in economic, urban, and environmental geography, with scores of published articles to his credit. He is … Continued
The Life and Ideas of John Maynard Keynes Zachary D. Carter is a senior reporter at HuffPost, where he covers Congress, the White House, and economic policy. He is the author of the book The Price of Peace: Money, Democracy, and the Life of John Maynard Keynes.
Peter Linebaugh, best known for tracing the history of the commons and of commoning practices, calls Thomas Paine “a planetary revolutionary.” He has found in Paine’s lesser-known works radical critiques of inequality and authoritarianism and even the system of money wages. Many lessons for our time, Linebaugh argues, can be drawn from Paine’s writings and … Continued
The History of Civilization, Science, and the Coronavirus. History can teach us about the causes of the COVID-19 pandemic and its possible consequences. Kyle Harper is a professor of classics and letters and senior vice president and provost at the University of Oklahoma. He is the author of The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and the End … Continued
