great depression | Wright's Writing

A free copy of my book

In June I published the book version of my Ph.D. dissertation, bearing the ungainly title Popular Radicalism and the Unemployed in...

On the inhumanity of Illinois's government in the 1930s

In case anyone is interested in the history of the Great Depression, particularly in Chicago, here's an excerpt from a chapter of my...

Introduction to my forthcoming book

If all goes well, I'll be publishing a book sometime in the not-too-distant future. It'll be called something like Popular Radicalism and...

The Workers' Bill

Here's the last section of chapter 6 of my dissertation on the unemployed in Chicago during the Depression. The previous two sections are...

On the Unemployed Councils and the Chicago Workers' Committee

The last chapter of my dissertation on the unemployed in Chicago during the Great Depression is, I think, more interesting than the...

The radical dimensions of mass consciousness, part 2

Here's the sequel to this post, from the last chapter of my Ph.D. thesis. It's just an excerpt. The main point of it is to argue against...

Homeless men in the Great Depression

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...

Primary sources on Communists and the unemployed during the Great Depression

While writing my PhD dissertation a few years ago ("Down But Not Out: The Unemployed in Chicago during the Great Depression"), I...

Gender norms in a Chilean copper mine

[This was supposed to be a short outline for a student presentation I had to give. So excuse the roughness. Here are more book reviews.]...

A Marxist history of World War II

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...

The coming great depression

The following is a resolution proposed at a Chicago conference of the Communist Party’s Unemployed Councils in 1930, in the context of...