Interrupted Odyssey: Ulysses S. Grant And The American Indians

By SIU Press

“In this first book devoted to the genesis, failure, and lasting legacy of Ulysses S. Grant’s comprehensive American Indian policy, Mary Stockwell shows Grant as an essential bridge between Andrew Jackson’s pushing Indians out of the American experience and Franklin D. Roosevelt’s welcoming them back in.
“Situating Grant at the center of Indian policy development after the Civil War, Interrupted Odyssey: Ulysses S. Grant and the American Indians reveals the bravery and foresight of the eighteenth president in saying that Indians must be saved and woven into the fabric of American life.”

Posted on September 28, 2018

Writers Under Surveillance

By Muckrock

“The FBI files on Hannah Arendt, Allen Ginsberg, Ernest Hemingway, James Baldwin and a dozen famous writers have a lot of stories to tell, and over the past eight years the MuckRock team has been digging through them.
“Today, we’re excited to tell those stories in a new format: a 400-page volume that brings the most funny, frightening, poignant, and provocative tales about the intersection of surveillance and freedom to life, as told through those primary source documents.”

Posted on September 18, 2018

Pulitzer Prize-Winning Book Censored In Illinois Prisons

By The Uptown People’s Law Center

Attorneys filed a lawsuit Thursday on behalf of historian Heather Thompson, whose Pulitzer Prize-winning book Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy was censored by Illinois prison officials.
Attorneys from Uptown People’s Law Center and Sidley Austin filed the lawsuit. It alleges that this censorship is “arbitrarily applied,” as the book was sent to three different prisons and censored only at Pontiac and Logan Correctional Centers. It argues this censorship is a violation of Thompson’s First Amendment right to communicate with incarcerated people, as such communication should only be restricted when there is a legitimate penological interest. The lawsuit also claims that Thompson’s Fourteenth Amendment right to due process was violated because she did not receive notice of this restriction, and as such was not provided an opportunity to challenge it.

Posted on September 13, 2018

Hothouse Earth Co-Author: ‘People Will Look Back On 2018 As The Year When Climate Reality Hit’

By Jessica Corbett/Common Dreams

Amid a flurry of “breathless headlines” about warnings in a new study that outlines a possible Hothouse Earth scenario, one co-author optimistically expressed his belief that “people will look back on 2018 as the year when climate reality hit.”
In an interview with the Guardian, Stockholm Resilience Center executive director Johan Rockström declared that “This is the moment when people start to realize that global warming is not a problem for future generations, but for us now.” Rockström’s study has received an “unprecedented” amount of global attention – 270,000 downloads in the first week alone.
“Published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the new study, while not conclusive in its findings, warns that humanity may be just 1°C away from creating a series of dynamic feedback loops that could push the world into a climate scenario not seen since the dawn of the Helocene Period, nearly 12,000 years ago,” Common Dreams reported.

Posted on September 11, 2018

From “Let’s Fucking Kill Him” To “We’re In Crazytown,” The Most Disturbing Excerpts From Bob Woodward’s New Book On The Trump White House

By Jake Johnson/Common Dreams

Bob Woodward has a book coming out next month that details the first year-and-a-half of Donald Trump’s presidency, and excerpts published by the Washington Post and CNN on Tuesday depict a White House in the midst of a “nervous breakdown” sparked by a man who top aides have referred to as “an idiot,” a “fucking moron,” a “professional liar,” and “a goddamn dumbbell” who has the understanding of “a fifth- or sixth-grader.”
According to the Post – where Woodward has worked as a reporter and editor for decades – the “thrust” of Fear: Trump in the White House “mostly focuses on substantive decisions and internal disagreements, including tensions with North Korea as well as the future of U.S. policy in Afghanistan.”
But these substantive decisions and disagreements often produced startling moments in which the president revealed his total ignorance and lack of fitness for office.

Posted on September 5, 2018