We surely know by now that freedom is more journey than destination, more a summons to struggle than a port-of-call in which to lie down and take s rest. We understand freedom most acutely, paradoxically, when we name the obstacles to our full humanity as unacceptable, and link arms to storm the barricades in the name of liberation. There are moments in history when an apparition of freedom appears clearly, and its meaning is transformed and enlarged—General Sherman’s “March to the Sea” was just such a moment. Twenty thousand enslaved people liberated themselves, taking freedom into their own hands in the wake of the march—they sought freedom in movement, and created a keen, detailed reimagining of freedom, reframing the meaning of the Civil War ever after. We’re joined in conversation by my dear friend and co-host for this episode, Jeff Jones, and Bennett Parten, the author of the remarkable new history, Somewhere Toward Freedom: Sherman’s March and the Story of America’s Largest Emancipation.

On September 27, 2025 we met up at Pilsen Community Books with Aaron Hughes and Arti Walker-Peddakotla of About Face: Veterans Against the War, a dynamic and powerful group involved in building an irresistible movement for peace and against war and fascism. About Face builds on and highlights the legacy and revolutionary power of GI resistance against the backdrop of military mobilizations to violently suppress people’s movements. They walk a difficult and necessary path, organizing inside the military as they support GI resistance and the right to refuse, and outside as they create structures of care and support that prevent enlistment in the imperial death machine in the first place. Their work dances a difficult dialectic as it embraces a fundamental contradiction: confronting and resisting the real harm erupting from the war-makers, and providing paths for radical reorientation for people who (like all of us) can be both perpetrators of harm and victims of a racial capitalist system. They are the authors of a new zine, State Violence, Abolition, and GI Resistance.