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May Day's Radical History

The date of Occupy's strike has ties to the eight-hour day movement, immigrant workers and American anarchism.
Men sitting in a bar, drinking and smoking in suits, implied to be members of the Mafia.

How Black Workers Challenged the Mafia

A story of intrigue and power involving union organizers, Black laundry workers, the Mafia, and the FBI in 1980s Detroit.
Protesters march againts the US-backed government of El Salvador in 1985.

How US Trade Unionists Opposed the Dirty War in El Salvador

Progressive forces in US labor took a stand in solidarity with trade unionists facing murderous repression in El Salvador.
Jack Conroy

Jack Conroy and the Lost Era of Proletarian Literature

In the midst of the Depression, Conroy helped encourage a new generation of working-class writers.
Conference of Studio Unions' months-long strike against Hollywood studios in 1945.

How Hollywood’s Black Friday Strike Changed Labor Across America

A 1945 union vs. studios battle set off broad right-wing hysteria—its lessons should resonate today.
Woman strikers marching past vandalized factory building.

The Autoworker Strikes That Changed America

The first UAW strike was in the 1930s. Over the next century, the union amassed significant power while demanding higher wages, better benefits and protections.
Lebanese auto worker Eva Habib in her work coveralls in 1929.

Arab American Labor

On the centrality of the working classes to the Arab American immigrant experience and the pivotal roles Arab Americans played in American labor.
Horseddrawn carts and shoppers in a bustling Haymarket Square in 1893.

The Chicago Evangelist Who Held a Gospel Revival To Stop a Strike

Dwight L. Moody and the 1884 Haymarket Affair offer a look at what happens when Christians side with the wealthy instead of working class.
Painting called "Hudibras’ Discomfiture at the Hands of the Skimmington," by Francis Le Piper, seventeenth century.

American Charivari

The history and context of the made-up aesthetics of the early Ku Klux Klan.
Detail from a Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers graphic, 1877.

America’s Oldest Railway Union Must Break With Its Right-Wing Past

Why does the government have the power to break massive union strikes? Part of the story is a history of conciliatory railway unionism.
George Wallace pointing to map of United States with "Wallace Country" written on it.

How the Right Turned “Freedom” Into a Dog Whistle

A new book traces the long history of cloaking racism in the language of resistance to an overbearing federal government.
Lithograph of federal troops crushing an 1877 rail strike.

Freight-Halting Strikes Are Rare, and This Would be the First in 3 Decades

Some rail unions are resisting government pressure to accept a new employment contract, but history suggests the authorities will keep the trains running.
Illustration of Jesus Christ showing anger at money changers in the temple

When Did Jesus Become a Capitalist?

How did a radical social activist, killed for his politics, become the figurehead of capitalist and imperial power?
A man sitting on a table.

A More Perfect Union

On the Black labor organizers who fought for civil rights after Reconstruction and through the twentieth century.
Photo taken from behind two men in a machine gun nest

‘The Road to Blair Mountain’

It’s the biggest battle on U.S. soil that most Americans have never heard of.

Police and Racist Vigilantes: Even Worse Than You Think

Is Trump a fascist? You should ask the same question of your local police.
Eugene Debs in a suit

Eugene Debs Believed in Socialism Because He Believed in Democracy

Eugene Debs’s unswerving commitment to democracy and internationalism was born out of his revulsion at the tyranny of industrial capitalism.

How ‘Jakarta’ Became the Codeword for US-Backed Mass Killing

The systematic mass murder and assault of accused communists in Indonesia by US-backed military forces has left a mark on the country and the world.

My Grandfather Participated in One of America’s Deadliest Racial Conflicts

J. Chester Johnson on the Elaine Race Massacre of 1919.
A crowd at an Industrial Workers of the World rally in New York in 1914.
partner

Why the Massacre at Centralia 100 Years Ago is Critically Important Today

Working-class radicalism once transcended nativist division — and can do so again.

The Greensboro Massacre at 40

Forty years after the Greensboro Massacre, a survivor talks about that day, and why organized workers are such a threat to the powerful.
UAW members during a sit-down strike in 1937

Remembering the First Clash Between UAW and GM

The GM strike recalls the Flint sit-down strikes of 1936-7: a profit-hungry corporation, a fed-up workforce, and workers' willingness to take militant action.
Flint, Michigan sit-down strike.

The 1936 Sit-Down Strike That Shook the Auto Industry

Over 136,000 GM workers participated in the strike in Flint, Michigan that became known as 'the strike heard round the world.'

‘They Will Remember Us’: The Miners of Black Harlan

A photographer travels to the heart of Appalachia to spend time with the area's last surviving black former coal miners.
Pinkerton detectives.

Who Were the Pinkertons?

A video game portrays the Wild West’s famous detective agency as violent enforcers of order. But the modern-day company disagrees.
Men observing teams of horses and mules.

Andrew Jackson and the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal

How the so-called champion of the common man set a precedent for using federal troops to quash labor unrest.

America’s Missing Labor Party

The history of labor strikes shows that, in order to achieve lasting success, workers need to capture political power.

How (or How Not) to Build a Labor Movement

Looking at the Pullman Strike and the political forces it stirred.
The front pages of major newspapers the day after the Greensboro Massacre.

Fighting the Klan in Reagan’s America

The KKK was on the march in the 1980s. What strategies worked to stem their rise?
A postcard illustrating the Carnegie blast furnaces along the Monongahela River, Homestead, Pennsylvania, 1908-1909.

The Homestead Strike

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