In 1919 Charlotte Anita Whitney, a wealthy white woman, received one of the first Communist Labor Party membership cards for the charter group of the northern California Communist Labor Party. Less than a decade later in Berkeley, California, a Jewish woman named Dorothy Ray Healey became a card-carrying member of the Young Communist League. Nearly forty years later, in 1966, Kendra Claire Harris Alexander, a mixed-race woman, enlisted with the Los Angeles branch of the Communist Party, de...

Anarchism urges man to think, to investigate, to analyze every proposition; but that the brain capacity of the average reader be not taxed too much, I also shall begin with a definition, and then elaborate on the latter. ANARCHISM: The philosophy of a new social order based on liberty unrestricted by man-made law; the theory that all forms of government rest on violence, and are therefore wrong and harmful, as well as unnecessary. The new social order rests, of course, on the materialistic...

Here is a pioneering account of everyday life under Stalin, written by one of our foremost authorities on modern Russian history. Focusing on urban areas in the 1930s, Sheila Fitzpatrick shows that with the adoption of collectivization and the first Five-Year Plan, everyday life was utterly transformed. With the abolition of the market, shortages of food, clothing, and all kinds of consumer goods became endemic. As peasants fled the collectivized villages, major cities were soon in the gri...

This is a political biography of one of the 20th century’s most emblematic left-wing figures - Salvador Allende, who was president of Chile until he was ousted by General Pinochet in a US-supported coup in 1973.Victor Figueroa Clark guides us through Allende's life and political project, answering some of the most frequently asked questions. Was he a revolutionary or a reformist? A bureaucrat or inspirational democrat? Figueroa Clark argues that Allende and the Popular Unity Party ...

What is the primary source of the world's discontent, of all the toxins that poison the progress of humanity? What is the social unit by which the Power Elite enforce their policy of divide and rule to ensure that the people never rise up and overthrow them? What is the mechanism for the transmission of harmful, irrational and dangerous religious beliefs such as those of the Christians, Muslims and Jews? The answer is the same in every case - THE FAMILY.The family is the ultimate s...

The Communist ManifestoFriedrich ENGELS (1820 - 1895) and Karl MARX (1818 - 1883)The Communist Manifesto was conceived as an outline of the basic beliefs of the Communist movement. The authors believed that the European Powers were universally afraid of the nascent movement, and were condemning as "communist," people or activities that did not actually conform to what the Communists believed. This Manifesto, then, became a manual for their beliefs.In...

This book traces the decisive political divisions within the broadly-defined Trotskyist movement by presenting key texts from both sides of the political debate as it happened. The book's overall thesis, argued in the introduction to the printed edition, which is separately published as an ebook, is that by the late 1940s there were two Trotskyisms. They had separated, fundamentally, through their different responses to events neither "side" expected: the transition of the Stalinist USSR f...

Jerre Wills was in his late teens when he began feeling something tugging at his shirt-tail, and finally pulling with the force of a 300 pound barn-door halibut heading for deep water on the end of a fishing line. Whatever the powerful pull was, its 5,000 mile beckon, brought the young Wills family to Alaska in March of 1959. First it was the homestead; hunting soon followed; commercial fishing, an improbable occupation became a passion; and becoming a pilot and flying small bush-planes wa...

Project Quick Find is the true story of sea lions trained to help U.S. Navy SEALs. Begun in Hawaii in the late 1960s, the project recruited trainers in Coronado, California, to successfully teach the animals to recover objects from the ocean floor. The program eventually received official navy certification, expanded its scope and evolved its mission. Author, photojournalist and former Navy SEAL Michael P. Wood documented the program in the 1970s and presents this fascinating look at the b...

Victor Arnautoff reigned as San Francisco's leading mural painter during the New Deal era. Yet that was only part of an astonishing life journey from Tsarist officer to leftist painter. Robert W. Cherny's masterful biography of Arnautoff braids the artist's work with his increasingly leftist politics and the tenor of his times. Delving into sources on Russian émigrés and San Francisco's arts communities, Cherny traces Arnautoff's life from refugee art student and assistant to Diego Rivera ...

Most communists, as any plains state patriot would have told you in the 1950s, lived in Los Angeles or New York City, not Minot, North Dakota. The Cold War as it played out across the Great Plains was not the Cold War of the American cities and coasts. Nor was it tempered much by midwestern isolationism, as common wisdom has it. In this book, David W. Mills offers an enlightening look at what most of the heartland was up to while America was united in its war on Reds. Cold War in a Col...

In the early 20th century, there was no better example of a classic American downtown than Los Angeles. Since World War II, Los Angeles's Historic Core has been "passively preserved," with most of its historic buildings left intact. Recent renovations of the area for residential use and the construction of Disney Hall and the Staples Center are shining a new spotlight on its many pre-1930s Beaux Arts, Art Deco, and Spanish Baroque buildings.