Shem Fleenor Boeken

Ramparts Magazine's Vietnam War examines the publication's depiction of America's war in Indochina, which was the magazine's greatest focus. Ramparts published more essays about Vietnam than about any other single topic. The magazine also went out of business just a few months after the official end of the war. Chapters examine the magazine's depiction of Vietnam as several wars in one. Chapter One unpacks the magazine's depiction of the war as a cultural phenomenon and abstraction that happened 13,000 miles away from the continental United States. Chapter Two examines the magazine's depiction of corporate interests in America's war in Indochina, followed by a chapter that examines Washington's war in Vietnam. That chapter is followed by an examination of the war lived by American soldiers, as well as the war endured by the Vietnamese people. The final chapter examines Ramparts Magazine's unflinching advocacy of the antiwar movement in the U.S.

Ramparts Magazine Muckrakes America examines the muckraking publication's relentless depiction of American society from 1962 - 1975, with chapters focused specifically the rapacious nature of Cold War crony capitalism, the prevalence of poverty, scarcity and want in the midst of what economist Kenneth Galbraith referred to as "The Affluent Society." Other chapters are focused on the publication's depiction of the American Empire's dependence on foreign oil; Law and Order and the weaponization of the American justice system and the rise of the prison industrial complex as a counterrevolutionary force in American society; other chapters chronicle the magazine's muckraking of corporate, political and educational corruption; other chapters focus on the publication's coverage of presidential politics, including the assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy and the Watergate Scandal.

This work of historical fiction is set in New York City, Spain, and Arizona in the late-1930s. The primary focus of the story is the socioeconomic and internal conflicts faced by the Abrahams family, which compel the protagonist, Zapata, to defy federal law to fight fascism in Spain. Shem Fleenor spent the summer and fall of 2015 at NYU’s Bobst Library special collections researching letters written by Americans who fought in Spain from 1937 to 1938. The majority of men and women who penned these letters, which ultimately inspired this saga, were desperate to eke out livelihoods by any means necessary during the Great Depression. The war in Spain promised them a paltry paycheck and, many of them hoped, a chance to strike a devastating blow at an economic system and political ideology that many believed systemically devalued human life and made cannon fodder of the working class.

Shem Fleenor's book presents a concise but broad history of systemic white supremacy in North American history and black resistance to it. The thesis of this book is that the Black Lives Matter movement was four hundred years in the making. Fleenor argues that "Black Lives Matter" does not equate to, as some think, "only black lives matter." The fact that so many opponents of the Black Lives Matter Movement think that the antipodal of "Black Lives Matter is "All Lives Matter," Fleenor argues, speaks to how deeply entrenched white supremacy is in American history and society. Chapter one provides an overview of the devaluing of black life and black resistance in the Americas before the American Revolution. Chapter two examines the devaluing of black life and black resistance in the Age of Revolution. Chapter three examines those themes in the antebellum era of American history; chapter four examines the American Civil War and Reconstruction; chapter five delves into the Gilded Age and Progressive Era; chapter six provides an overview of white supremacy and black resistance from World War I through World War II. Chapter seven rehashes African American resistance to white supremacy during the Cold War. The eighth and final chapter explores the often ignored but no less pernicious racism that took shape in American society in the decades after the social upheavals of the 1960s.