The New York Times

Articles from The New York Times

Karl Marx Reviewed (NY Times, 1887)

To be sure, the book review of Das Kapital by Karl Marx that appeared in The New York Times in 1887 was very different from the review that same paper would give that book today. For this reviewer, Marx was one of the advocates of chaos, and a militant political economist:

If he is anything, Karl Marx is a man in a towering rage. His paragraphs are replete with kicks and cuffs. He wants to slap your face if you are a bourgeois; to smash your skull if you are a capitalist.


Click here to read an article by Leon Trotsky.

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CARRY ON by Coningsby Dawson (NY Times, 1917)

Attached, you will find the 1917 review of Carry On
by Coningsby Dawson (1883 – 1959). The book is a collection of the author’s beautifully crafted letters that were written to his family while he served on the Western Front during the First World War. Dawson’s ability to convey the urgency of the allied cause was so well received he was assigned to write two additional books by the British Ministry of Information: The Glory of the Trenches and Out to Win, both published in 1918 (neither of the two were any where near as moving as the one that is reviewed here).


Click here to read about W.W. I art.

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The War Begins (NY Times, 1861)

The ball has opened. War is inaugurated. The batteries of Sullivan’s Island, Morris Island and other points were opened on Fort Sumpter at 4 ‘oclock this morning… The answer to General Beauregard’s demand by Major Anderson was that he would surrender when his supplies were exhausted, that is, if he was not reinforced.


Here are the dispatches from Charleston that appeared on the front page of the New York Times on April 13, 1861.

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‘A Negro Poet” (NY Times, 1897)

Here is the NY Times review of Lyrics of Lowly Life (1897) by Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872 – 1906), who was a distinguished African-American poet, novelist, and playwright of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. If Helen had the face that launched a thousand ships, then Dunbar had the poetry to launch at least twenty thousand schools – for it seems that is about how many there are named for him.

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The Lynching of African-Americans in France (NY Times, 1921)

This disturbing article from 1921 reported on a series of lynchings that took place between the years 1917 through 1919 by U.S. Army personnel serving in France during the First World War. The journalist quoted witness after witness who appeared before the Senate Committee regarding the lynchings they had seen:

Altogether…I saw ten Negroes and two white men hanged at Is-Sur-Tille. Twenty-eight other members of my command also witnessed these hangings and if necessary, I can produce them.


Read about racism in the U.S. Army of W.W. I

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‘How We Made the October Revolution” (New York Times, 1919)

Here is Leon Trotsky’s reminiscence of those heady days in 1917 that served as the first step in a 75 year march that went nowhere in particular and put millions of people in an early grave – this is his recollection of the fall of the Kerensky Government and the creation of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics(R.I.P.).

THE REVOLUTION was born directly from the war, and the war became the touchstone of all the revolutionary parties and energies…


The review of the first English edition of Das Kapital can be read here…

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