'The Great Conspiracy Against Russia'
By Michael Sayers and Albert Kahn
(1946)
http://marxism.halkcephesi.net/Great%20Conspiracy/index.htm This was the best historical book I read last year. I came across it in a footnote of Harry Haywood's autobiography 'Black Bolshevik' which I stopped one third of the way through because Albert Kahn's book was stupendous.
I'll return to Haywood's autobiography later. It's packed full of rich pieces of knowledge and and insight like that. Haywood's book is also likely the best history of the communist party USA showing the causes and history of its degeneration in the 1950s.
I think it's also the best history of black civil rights in the past 100 years I've come across critiquing the drawbacks of things like the Garvey movement, NAACP, and Martin Luther King and the American power structure.
I'm saving Haywood's older and controversial 1948 book 'Negro Liberation' for later as I know its strategy goes way beyond reparations for slavery. I have read it contains a strategy to give the descendents of slaves and poor whites 40 acres and a mule which Reconstruction failed to do when it was back stabbed in 1877. This strategy involves the possibility of dismemberment of the USA by means of a liberated American black south gaining its sovereignty and the right to secede if it so chooses, although not necessarily. Such a reality would involve breaking the back of American military power and the book doesn't shy from violence if necessary and views the black belt in the American south as an oppressed nation just like Hawaii and Puerto Rico. It differs from Garvey in that it views exploited white minorities as friends and fellow blacks. Opposition to this book was one of the major causes of division in the CPUSA in the 1950's. It is basically the application of Stalin's thesis of national liberation to American blacks. It is critical of King, urban League, and NAACP as being loyalists of American empire.