As pivotal spaces for leftists to strategize and engage one another, political party bookstores were key in supporting the labor movement, pushing for racial equality, working on behalf of revolutionary freedom fighters, and participating in global solidarity and struggle. In doing so, they created the space for their customers to not only radically reimagine their worlds, but to participate in activating their radical imaginations.

The Power Keys

Exhibition Review, “Robert Caro’s the Power Broker at 50” and “‘Turn Every Page’: Inside the Robert A. Caro Archive,” New-York Historical Society.

Those tiny notes, scrawled on index cards and scraps of paper and taped to lampshades or thumbtacked to his famous office corkboard, are included in two microscopically immersive exhibitions at the New-York Historical Society, both of which showcase the society’s acquisition, five years ago, of Caro’s voluminous papers. That trove has now yielded “Robert Caro’s The Power Broker at 50” (curated by Meredith Mann), which focuses on Caro’s Pulitzer-Prize winning 1974 biography of Robert Moses, and “‘Turn Every Page’: Inside the Robert A. Caro Archive” (curated by Michael Ryan, Edward O’Reilly, and Debra Schmidt Bach), which emphasizes the nitty-gritty of Caro’s writing process, especially as it relates to The Years of Lyndon Johnson, his sprawling four-volume biography of the 36th president (the long-awaited fifth volume is still in the offing).