Death in the Haymarket: A Story of Chicago, The First Labor Movement, and The Bombing That Divided Gilded Age America by James Green.  New York: Pantheon, 2006.

On the evening of May 4, 1886, laborers gathered to attend a rally in Chicago’s Haymarket Square to protest the city police force’s use of lethal force in suppressing a strike at the McCormick Reaper Works several days before. Speakers addressed the crowd in several languages, and as the  speeches drew to a close six police divisions arrived to break up the demonstration. At this moment, a sputtering red fuse became visible  as a small projectile arched its way through the night air and landed amid the police. READ MORE

By Liam Hysjulien

In a study last year by Professors Dan Ariely and Micahel L. Norton aptly titled “Building A Better America—One Wealth Quintile At A Time,” we learned that Americans have little concept of the median income in this country or the gross disparity between income levels. Television pundits, the new class of often factless “experts,” lament the growing sentiment of “class envy” or the vitriolic “class warfare” spreading across our cultural landscape. These same experts woefully ignore the simple facts that wages have remained largely stagnant over the last three decades, while the prices of basic goods have steadily risen (although the current recession slowed this price increase). READ MORE

By Alejandro Moreiras

Ashams, the area called Suriya by the Byzantines, was conquered by the Arabs in the mid-seventh century, much of the fighting being over by 650.

It was an ancient land, a land of plenty. The Arabs had known Syria as the southeastern semiarid desert plateaus of that country run into the harsh, dry deserts of Arabia, in a continuity not unknown to the traveling Arabian tradesmen, pilgrim, and Bedouin. But the land was not predominantly Arab, although there were Arabs. Its population was, as it has always been, impressively heterogeneous. Its countryside sprinkled with monasteries of different church orders, whether Monophysite or Diophysite, Syriac, Latin, or Orthodox. Christianity, in its many forms, was the majority religion. But there were also Jews, Samaritans, Pagans, Armenians, Aramaens, and of course, the traveler—merchant or pilgrim—who could have been of any religion or nationality. The Byzantine Empire—the Muslim’s arch-enemy—with a capital in what is now called Istanbul, considered Syria its southern jewel. A cradle of civilization. The Holy Land. READ MORE