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  • The Book Trust – an attempt to monopolize cheap book production in the 1800s

    Back in 1889, John W. Lovell was attempting to create a “book trust”, or a cartel of book publishers to control prices by limiting competition between the publishers.

  • Etsy Helps Create Microbusiness Caucus, a Challenge to Labor Organizing

    Congress now has a Microbusiness Caucus, but does it represent workers? I’d say “no”. It’s for Etsy and those other companies, first, and only secondarily for people who sell on Etsy, and, lastly, for all the workers involved in producing for the Etsy marketplace platform.

  • Chili History

    https://www.texasmonthly.com/food/heyday-chili-con-carne/ Two interesting things I noticed: there’s a Chinese grocery store in the photo. “…one of the Chili Queens’ many forced migrations back and forth across San Antonio—from Military Plaza to Alamo Plaza, Market Square to Haymarket Square, Milam Park back to Military Plaza, and so on. When city fathers decided to “improve” a square,…

  • L.A. History: A Mexican Perspective

    Link: A Legendarily Censored Chicana Mural Finds Itself Shielded From View Once Again I don’t understand how this mural is “controversial” or “negative”. There’s nothing on there that hasn’t been seen in some TV public affairs programming from the 1970s or 1980s. It’s just what people call LA history.  (I don’t even understand how it’s …

  • More Little Tokyo Redevelopment, 1969

    More Little Tokyo Redevelopment, 1969

    I went to visit my mother, and she had this old copy of the Nisei Week 1969 program. She was in it!  She, my grandma, and I were in a photo. You couldn’t see me, because I was swaddled in a blanket.  They weren’t even captioned, because it was a photo of someone else. Anyway,…

  • Little Tokyo Urban Renewal 1972, Urban Renewal Researcher from Japan 1968, Gentrification Notes

    Little Tokyo Urban Renewal 1972, Urban Renewal Researcher from Japan 1968, Gentrification Notes

    I’ve been going through the hoard and stumbled on a couple unrelated things that, today, seem related. Gentrification has swept across downtown LA, and it recalls, for some people older than I, Urban Renewal.  Urban Renewal was criticized and mocked as really “Negro Removal”.  These photos show a couple articles and a letter that all…

  • Kats Kunitsugu in the Kashu Mainichi

    Kats Kunitsugu in the Kashu Mainichi

    by

    in

    I came across this column, and read it, and was moved. I searched for a clipping (shown above) that I was selling, of Kats Kunitsugu giving something to Ed Roybal to support his run for Lt. Governor in 1954. It was gone. I couldn’t find it. It was some East LA history there, and I…

  • The Anti Nazi Parade – history of anti-fascism in Los Angeles (and some fascism)

    https://barrioboychik.wordpress.com/2015/11/22/the-anti-nazi-parade-boyle-heights-1938/

  • The Mirror

    Los Angeles is now what we call a “one newspaper town”, but it used to support at least five papers in English.  One of these, which I have never seen a complete copy of, is The Mirror, the Chandler family’s paper. It merged with the Times, and that’s why it was called Times-Mirror for so…

  • The Independent Progressive Party

    This is a clipping from the Rafu, and I think it’s around 1952, because it mentions the McCarran Walter Act, which passed in 1952. I recognized Art Takei’s name, because he was one of the founders of APALA, the API labor organization within the AFL-CIO. Fumi Ishihara, I didn’t recognize, but the internet is amazing,…