A Peoples History

Cesar Chavez is the most prominent Latino in United States history books, and much has been written about Chavez and the United Farm Worker's heyday in the 1960s and '70s. … [Read more]

Vladimir V.Putin stood on the landing of a staircase outside the Grand Kremlin Palace. Ceremonial troops paraded before him. … [Read more]

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates — In his old life in Cairo, Rami Galal knew his place and his fate: to become a maintenance man in a hotel, just like his father. … [Read more]

After September 11th, 2001, the Ground Zero site in New York City was classified as a crime scene and only those directly involved in the recovery efforts were allowed inside. The press was also prohibited from the site, but with the help of the Museum of the City of New York and sympathetic city officials, award-winning photographer Joel Meyerowitz managed to obtain unlimited access. By ingenuity and sheer determination, he was the only photographer granted unimpeded right of entry into Ground Zero.For 9 months, during the day and night, Meyerowitz photographed "the pile," as the World Trade Center came to be known, and the over 800 people a day that were working in it. Influenced by Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange's work for the Farm Security Administration during the Great Depression, he knew that if he didn't make a photographic record of the unprecedented recovery efforts, "there would be no history."Sept. 23. Assembled panorama of the site from the World Financial Center, looking east. (All images copyright Joel Meyerowitz from Aftermath: World Trade Center Archive (Phaidon).Sept. 25. The south wall of the South Tower. Oct. 11. An FDNY rescue team resting on Liberty Street.Nov. 8. Spotters in the South Tower. May 1. Ralph and Paul Geidel waiting for a fresh raking field. … [Read more]

With the Olympics over, I hope the Western sport of bashing China over Tibet might stop.
    Working in Beijing during the Tibet riots and the preparations for the Olympics gave me a unique perspective. Growing up with Western media and Hollywood, I am used to our embrace of the Dalai Lama. Being in China, I saw the Chinese point of view.
    Seeing both sides suggests the need to abandon simplistic political stances in favor of some self-reflection and historical context.
    Although we should criticize China's censored media, the Tibet riots revealed some troubling blindness among our own media. While the causes of Tibetan unrest are complex, it is clear that the March riots were started by Tibetan protesters and that they were quite violent. Indeed, they were violent enough to lead the Dalai Lama to threaten resignation if his followers did not stop the violence.
    Since "violent Tibetan" does not fit our stereotype, our media fixed the news. While Chinese media showed extensive footage of violence and interviews with Chinese and Tibetan victims, Western media manipulated images and even showed footage from other countries (Nepal and India) in order to paint a picture of ruthless oppression by China's government. … [Read more]

This intimate, heart-rending portrait of New Orleans in the wake of the destruction tells the heartbreaking personal stories of those who endured this harrowing ordeal and survived to tell the tale of misery, despair and triumph.

The film also looks at a community that has been through hell and back, surviving death, devastation and disease at every turn. Yet, somehow, amidst the ruins, the people of New Orleans are finding new hope and strength as the city rises from the ashes, buoyed by their own resilience and a rich cultural legacy.

"New Orleans is fighting for its life," says Lee. "These are not people who will disappear quietly - they're accustomed to hardship and slights, and they'll fight for New Orleans. This film will showcase the struggle for New Orleans by focusing on the profound loss, as well as the indomitable spirit of New Orleaneans."

WHEN THE LEVEES BROKE is Spike Lee's third feature-length collaboration with HBO, following 1998's "4 Little Girls," which was Oscar®-nominated in the Documentary Feature category, and 2002's "Jim Brown: All-American." Sam Pollard produces and edits the film. Sheila Nevins is executive producer; Jacqueline Glover is the supervising producer for HBO. Cliff Charles serves as cinematographer.
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Hurricane Katrina shredded one of the great cities of the South, and as levees failed and the federal relief effort proved lethally incompetent, a natural disaster became a man-made catastrophe. As an editor of New Orleans’ daily newspaper, the Pulitzer Prize—winning Times-Picayune, Jed Horne has had a front-row seat to the unfolding drama of the city’s collapse into chaos and its continuing struggle to survive.

As the Big One bore down, New Orleanians rich and poor, black and white, lurched from giddy revelry to mandatory evacuation. The thousands who couldn’t or wouldn’t leave initially congratulated themselves on once again riding out the storm. But then the unimaginable happened: Within a day 80 percent of the city was under water. The rising tides chased horrified men and women into snake-filled attics and onto the roofs of their houses. Heroes in swamp boats and helicopters braved wind and storm surge to bring survivors to dry ground. Mansions and shacks alike were swept away, and then a tidal wave of lawlessness inundated the Big Easy. Screams and gunshots echoed through the blacked-out Superdome. Police threw away their badges and joined in the looting. Corpses drifted in the streets for days, and buildings marinated for weeks in a witches’ brew of toxic chemicals that, when the floodwaters finally were pumped out, had turned vast reaches of the city into a ghost town.
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Winner of the Grand Jury Prize at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival, Trouble the Water is directed and produced by Fahrenheit 9/11 and Bowling for Columbine producers Tia Lessin and Carl Deal. The film tells the story of an aspiring rap artist and her streetwise husband, trapped in New Orleans by deadly floodwaters, who survive the storm and then seize a chance for a new beginning. It’s a redemptive tale of self-described street hustlers who become heroes that takes you inside Hurricane Katrina in a way never before seen on screen.

Trouble the Water opens the day before Katrina makes landfall, just blocks away from the French Quarter but far from the New Orleans that tourists know. Kimberly Rivers Roberts is turning her video camera on herself and her 9th Ward neighbors trapped in the city. “It’s going to be a day to remember,” Kim says excitedly into her new camera as the storm is brewing. It’s her first time shooting video and it’s rough, jumpy but dense with reality. Kim’s playful home-grown newscast tone grinds against the audience’s knowledge that hell is just hours away. There is no way for the audience to warn her. And for New Orleans’ poor, there is nowhere to run.

As the hurricane begins to rage and the floodwaters fill their world and the screen, Kim and her husband Scott continue to film, documenting their harrowing voyage to higher ground and dramatic rescues of friends and neighbors. … [Read more]

Toni Morrison has said that her acclaimed novel “Beloved,” which features the ghost of a baby killed by her enslaved black mother, came out of the need for a literature to commemorate slaves and their history. “There is no suitable memorial, or plaque, or wreath or wall, or park or skyscraper lobby,” Ms. Morrison said in a 1989 magazine interview. “There’s no 300-foot tower, there’s no small bench by the road.”

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In the milder last years of the Franco era in Spain, with the regime doing more appealing than dictating to the public, roadside signs went up warning of wildfires: “When the Forest Burns It Is Your Forest Burning.” Soon a derisive “Sir Count!” could be read scrawled at the end of one of them. … [Read more]

A beautifully-produced book that celebrates the Freedom Riders, featuring rare-seen mug shots alongside stunning contemporary portraits.In the spring and summer of 1961, several hundred Americans—blacks and whites, men and women—converged on Jackson, Mississippi, to challenge state segregation laws. The Freedom Riders, as they came to be known, were determined to open up the South to civil rights: it was illegal for bus and train stations to discriminate, but most did and were not interested in change. Over 300 people were arrested and convicted of the charge "breach of the peace."
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James Miles describes his experience as the only Western journalist reporting from Tibet during the eruption of the violent riots and unrest that began on March 14 in the city of Lhasa.

MILLBROOK, NY — July 21, 2008 — If you are living in the eastern United States, the environment around you is being harmed by air pollution. From Adirondack forests and Shenandoah streams to Appalachian wetlands and the Chesapeake Bay, a new report by the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies and The Nature Conservancy has found that air pollution is degrading every major ecosystem type in the northeastern and mid-Atlantic United States. … [Read more]

The World Bank and its partners need to do a far better job of considering the environmental effects of projects they finance in poor countries, its internal review group concludes in a new report. … [Read more]

This week PBS' Bill Moyers Journal travels to ground zero of the mortgage meltdown—Cleveland, Ohio. Correspondent Rick Karr takes viewers to Slavic Village, one of the hardest hit neighborhoods in the nation when it comes to the spate of foreclosures caused by the subprime mortgage crisis. There, more than 1,000 homes stand vacant and decaying in a neighborhood that once thrived with families living the American dream of home ownership. Moyers gets perspective from veteran journalist William Greider on the current financial crisis and what he calls "the great deflation of Wall Street."
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Attorney Philippe Sands Follows the Bush Administration Torture Trail. A new exposé in Vanity Fair by British attorney Philippe Sands reveals new details about how attorney John Yoo and other high-ranking administration lawyers helped design and implement the interrogation policies seen at Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib and secret CIA prisons. According to Vanity Fair, then-White House counsel Alberto Gonzales and other top officials personally visited Guantanamo in 2002, discussed interrogation techniques and witnessed interrogations. Sands joins us in our firehouse studio.

Attorney Philippe Sands Follows the Bush Administration Torture Trail. A new exposé in Vanity Fair by British attorney Philippe Sands reveals new details about how attorney John Yoo and other high-ranking administration lawyers helped design and implement the interrogation policies seen at Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib and secret CIA prisons. According to Vanity Fair, then-White House counsel Alberto Gonzales and other top officials personally visited Guantanamo in 2002, discussed interrogation techniques and witnessed interrogations. Sands joins us in our firehouse studio.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, under fire for apparently discounting the impact of climate change, on Thursday said global warming poses real risk to human health and the American way of life.

Risks include more heat-related deaths, more heart and lung diseases due to increased ozone and health problems related to hurricanes, extreme precipitation and wildfires, the agency said in a new report.

 T. Boone Pickens, the famous oilman, has presented a new energy plan  centered around solar power and natural gas. Take a look at the video of his new energy plan. … [Read more]