Wright's Writing

Here's another over-long blog post. It's a chapter from my dissertation, on homeless men during the Great Depression. I'm not sure it's...

Grad student notes from 2010.— One of the advantages of Marx’s equation of progress with the expansion of productive capacity is that it...

[Student notes from ten years ago.] Reading Robert A. Brady’s classic Business as a System of Power (1943), which influenced Chomsky....

As I frequently and tiresomely reiterate, academic writing tends toward sophistry, superficiality, and obscurantism. Personally, my...

[Here are some notes from the first syllabus I wrote for the U.S. History After 1865 survey course. Below them are overly ambitious notes...

[Also here]. I’ve been reading Gabriel and Joyce Kolko’s classic The Limits of Power: The World and United States Foreign Policy, 1945–54...

[Years ago I took notes on the book mentioned below, which I thought I'd post here for the heck of it. Maybe someone will find them...

Here's a list of some good leftist books I've come across over the years. Click on the titles for the PDFs. It's a somewhat arbitrary...

With regard to the period between the 1530s and 1640s, the great Marxian historian Steve Stern divides the economic system that prevailed...

In The Populist Vision, Charles Postel argues persuasively that Populism, the greatest popular movement in American history, should not...

Years ago I took some notes on Gabriel Kolko’s classic The Triumph of Conservatism: A Reinterpretation of American History 1900–1916...

In history, few topics can be more relevant to our own world than the origin of capitalism. Ellen Meiksins Wood's book on that subject...

[The following are lecture notes I wrote, based mainly on Eric Foner's classic Reconstruction. As I found out, they were more than a...

I recently read a book by Chris Bambery called The Second World War: A Marxist History (2014) and decided it was good enough to take...

In an age when the State is daily demonstrating its willingness, or rather its extraordinary eagerness, to brutally repress dissent and...

[Random journal notes.] Reading Elizabeth Tandy Shermer’s Sunbelt Capitalism: Phoenix and the Transformation of American Politics (2013)....

Notes on a classic. (See also these notes.)— In Inevitable Revolutions: The United States in Central America (1993), Walter LaFeber...

The fulfillment of the [Marxian] prophecy.— As capital has become more mobile internationally since the 1970s (the era of globalization),...

[This is an excerpt from Notes of an Underground Humanist.] You should read Peter Kropotkin’s essay “The State: Its Historic Role.”...

What is the significance of the fact that in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries certain (semi-fascist) sections of the...