Peter Dreier

The 20th anniversary of the Los Angeles riots have triggered a number of fascinating reports examining the underlying causes of the unrest and the changes (in attitudes and actions) that have taken place in the past two decades.

Scholars at the University of Southern California produced a...

With one paragraph at the end of his column in the current (June 4-11) Newsweek, Howard Kurtz unwittingly revealed what's wrong with the way the mainstream media cover politics.

Kurtz devoted most of the column to explore which Democrats are lining up to run for president in 2016....

Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner is known as a workaholic, given to exhausting 70-plus hour work weeks. But he was at home late Sunday afternoon -- perhaps planning on watching baseball or basketball, catching up on his reading, or just chilling with family or friends -- when about a thousand uninvited...

On Thursday the Washington National Cathedral dedicated a new stone carving of Rosa Parks. It will be displayed in the Cathedral's Human Rights Porch.

The area already includes likenesses of Oscar Romero, the brave Catholic Archbishop of El Salvador, who spoke out against the U.S. for giving...

In 1935, when President Franklin Roosevelt signed the National Labor Relations Act, giving workers the right to unionize, he described it as a matter of "common justice." He did so as workers around the country were engaged in mass protests and strikes. Union organizers soon began telling workers that "The...

The defeat Tuesday of Senator Richard Lugar of Indiana in the Republican primary -- trounced by a Tea-Partier -- is one more nail in the coffin of the GOP's conservative wing. Conservative? Isn't Lugar a hands-across-the-ideological-divide bipartisan moderate?

During his 36 years in the Senate, Lugar certainly had some bipartisan...

I recently spent several days in Milwaukee to give a talk at the University of Wisconsin about urban history and politics. My new book, The 100 Greatest Americans of the 20th Century: A Social Justice Hall of Fame, includes a profile of Victor Berger -- the leader of...

Today is Pete Seeger's 93rd birthday.

What's an appropriate gift for the most influential folk artist of the 20th century? A few years ago some of Pete's fans launched a campaign to nominate him for the Nobel Peace Prize. It is time to resurrect that effort.

No one...

Unlike the rest of the world's democracies, the United States doesn't use the metric system, doesn't require employers to provide workers with paid vacations, hasn't abolished the death penalty, and doesn't celebrate May Day as an official national holiday.

Outside the U.S., May 1 is international workers'...

Woody Guthrie -- who wrote more than 3,000 songs and is best known for "This Land Is Your Land," often considered America's alternative national anthem -- had his first big break and taste of success while living in Los Angeles from 1937 to 1940. His experiences in South California during...

Fifty years ago this month Michael Harrington wrote a book, The Other America: Poverty in the United States - a haunting tour of deprivation in an affluent society - that inspired Presidents John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson to wage a war on poverty. This slim, 186-page volume became a best-seller...

C. Wright Mills, the radical Columbia University sociologist who died 50 years ago (March 20, 1962) at age 45, would have loved Occupy Wall Street. In the 1950s, when most college professors were cautious about their political views and lifestyles, Mills rode a motorcycle to work; wore plaid shirts, jeans...

As a 16-year-old high school student in Montgomery, Alabama, Octavia Spencer worked as an intern on The Long Walk Home, a film starring Whoopi Goldberg as a maid who gets involved with the Montgomery bus boycott. It was Spencer's first experience on a film set. At this year's Oscars, Spencer...

Arturo de los Santos, a 46-year-old Marine who lives in Riverside, California, doesn't usually listen to National Public Radio, but a friend told him to pay attention to a disturbing report broadcast Monday on NPR's "Morning Edition." The report disclosed that Freddie Mac, the government-sponsored mortgage...

"I'm so scared of this anti-Wall Street effort. I'm frightened to death," Frank Luntz, an influential GOP pollster and strategist, warned the Republican Governors Association at a meeting in Florida last month, referring to the Occupy movement. "They're having an impact on what the American people think of...

Even though their encampments have been dismantled, the ripple effects of the Occupy Wall Street movement are being felt throughout the country, including in the Republican Party's presidential primaries. As the New York Times' Jeff Zeleny wrote on Saturday, "Mitt Romney has spent days defending himself against accusations...

At the opening ceremonies of the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta, Muhammad Ali suddenly appeared on a platform in the stadium. Janet Evans, a five-time Olympic medalist in swimming, passed the heavy Olympic torch to Ali. Shaking from Parkinson's disease and perhaps from nervousness, he stood for a moment acknowledging...

With one statement on Thursday, Newt Gingrich, who constantly reminds voters about his past as a college professor, managed to mangle the facts while resorting to old-fashioned racist stereotypes to gain votes. With his poll numbers sinking, and his presidential campaign desperate, Gingrich told a crowd at a...

Through a story of personal tragedy and the virtues of small-town life, voluntarism, and compassion, the New York Times' David Brooks has written a column that unwittingly exposes our nation's outrageous cruelty and callousness.

In his December 30 column, "Going Home Again," Brooks tells the story of...

After five weeks, Harvard students just evacuated the tents they had pitched on campus as part of the Occupy Wall Street movement. Their protest helped persuade the university to raise wages and benefits for the college custodians. The students intend to continue their activism by other means, focusing on issues...