Archive of History

Complete your Mike Davis bookshelf with this reading list! All 40% off (print books) and 60% off (ebooks) until January 4th.

In The Invention of Sicily, Jamie Mackay offers a sweeping history of Sicily from ancient times to the present day. Mackay presents Sicily's history as one of an autonomous community fighting for liberation against their oppressors.

Historian Alexander Zevin looks through the pages of the Economist and finds a record of democracy's challenge to liberalism.

Liam Campling and Alejandro Colás analyze the relationship between the land and sea in capitalist production, reproduction, and circulation.

Chris Vials explores the history of fascism under Mussolini and in Latin America to interpret the mayhem at the Capitol on January 6.

The development of distinctive property forms in English agriculture entailed new forms of class struggle. If we want to sum up the ways in which class struggle between landlords and peasants 'liberated' capitalism, it might be closer to the truth to say that capitalism was advanced by the assertion of the landlords' powers against the peasants' claims to customary rights. 

Robert Bevan investigates the political and historical debates behind taking down statues

While delegates made their way to Chicago for the 1968 Democratic National Convention, tens of thousands of protesters were set to converge in the city for a week of civil disobedience. Protesters, passersby, and even residents out on their porches were beaten. The chasing, swinging, and clubbing was indiscriminate. Journalists, denied any special treatment, were battered and taunted, at times even targeted.

In this excerpt from Tear Gas, Anna Feigenbaum describes the history of the Himsworth Report, used by governments around the world to justify the use of tear gas.

Henry Wallace was attacked and then dismissed because he proposed “a century of the common man and woman.” Almost eighty years of that century have passed since his dismissal, and his fight for the future is largely forgotten.