A meeting of Aymara mothers as part of ayllu reconstitution efforts in Ilata, Bolivia, 1985. The group is ritually sharing and chewing coca leaves, which are spread out in the center of the gathering. Courtesy of the Andean Oral History Workshop. BY BENJAMIN DANGL Grassroots people’s movements around the globe have wielded histories of resistance as tools in their struggles to build a better world. Some…
Street art in Kerala, December 2019. Compiled by Swati Chawla, Jessica Namakkal, Kalyani Ramnath, and Lydia Walker India’s controversial Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) was signed into law on Friday, December 12th,…
Image: “Shut it Down” (2017) by Roger Peet, https://justseeds.org/graphic/shut-it-down-2/ Compiled by Danielle M. Purifoy Environmental Justice (EJ) scholarship in the United States emerged in tandem with social movement activism during the 1980s. Environmental Justice…
Graffiti on a stretch of border fencing between the US and Mexico calls for an end to the incarceration of immigrants. Courtesy of Christoph Buchel/Creative Commons. By María Cristina García, Adam Goodman, Erika Lee, Maddalena Marinari, and Evan Taparata *Editor's Note: This essay is part of the Abusable Past's "The Border…
Lizzie Bordern directs Born in Flames, 1983. By Ryan Murphy A METHODOLOGY FOR U.S. LABOR HISTORY IN THE 21st CENTURY Labor history is a field with new relevance in an era of…
Accusing Cow Compiled by Gabriel N. Rosenberg Animal Studies queries the relationship between nonhuman animals (or “animals”) and human social orders. It is an interdisciplinary field, encompassing…
Wheatpaste poster created by Oaxacan street artist Yescka. https://guerilla-art.mx/tag/ayotzinapa/ Compiled by Fernando Herrera Calderón In September 2014, 43 students from the Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers' College, a school designed to train rural teachers in Mexico,…
“Stop Police Killings,” CAPA Papers, Southern California Library From 2015 to 2018, historians of policing Max Felker-Kantor and Simon Balto lived within a mile of each other in Indianapolis. At the time, both…
White Night Riots flier, 1979 Compiled by Emily K. Hobson Interest in queer history and queer politics have grown exponentially in recent years. Among students especially, such attention has been…
Our Bodies Our Rights // art by Meredith Stern (justseeds) Compiled by Pam Butler In recent months, US state-level policymakers have proposed and passed increasingly severe restrictions on abortion access, with the end goal of…