Expressionist painters like Barnett Newman describes this period in time as a sensation of feeling "the moral crisis of a world in shambles, a world devastated by a great depression and a fierce world war, and it was impossible at that time to paint the kind of paintings that we were doingflowers, reclining nudes, and people playing the cello" (Newman 287). They tapped into a source of raw, emotional power, partially as a way to over-take the hugely popular art of Europe.

S alt of the Earth is often remembered as the primary counternarrative of the cold war. A film made by blacklisted artists, it presents a miners' strike in which a largely Mexican American and Native American union overcomes a Taft-Hartley injunction after the ladies' auxiliary takes over the picket line. 1 Against this backdrop, mine worker Ramón Quintero and his wife, Esperanza, negotiate their new roles, as Esperanza struggles for equality as strike captain and Ramón chafes against the perceived threat to his masculinity. These two narratives, of a strike by a minority union with a long history of racial consciousness and the story of the miners' wives' empowerment as they take over the picket line, challenge central cultural and institutional doctrines of the postwar order: maintenance of the color line, the cold war cult of domesticity, and more than anything, the notion of labor-management "peace" as key to the prosperity of working-class Americans.

http://reconstruction.eserver.org/Issues/144/Balthaser.shtml

An essay on the centrality of the rentier class in Piketty's historical description of capitalism. By focusing on the rentier, Piketty describes a capitalism that, unlike Marx's or even the neoclassical vision of capitalism, is static, unchanging, and remarkably resistant to revolution and systemic change.  Only a massive shock to the system can only occur  when giant, external calamities such as world wars allow governments to seize assets, nationalize industries, and confiscate wealth - it is an apocalyptic theory of social change.

100 years ago, anti-lynching activists re-circulated lynching photos as part of their strategy to expose the pathologies of white supremacy.  What does this history have to tell us about the current circulation of videos depicting the murder of black men and women by police?  http://www.bostonreview.net/us/benjamin-balthaser-racial-violence-black-and-white#.V4apgXpSwb4.facebook