#BlueCollarWriter Labor News Update - October 14, 2025:
https://www.bluecollarwriter.com/home/labor-news-update

#1u #UnionStrong #UnionYes #ItsBetterInAUnion #LaborHistory #NLRB #Jobs #Economy

Today in History October 14, 1994: Three terrorists, Yasser Arafat, Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres, won the Nobel Peace Prize, once again proving the Tom Lehrer quote that the prize has made political satire obsolete.

#workingclass #LaborHistory #israel #palestine #nobelprize #terrorism #arafat #plo #rabin #peres

Today in Labor History October 14, 1979 The first National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights draws approximately 100,000 people.

#workingclass #LaborHistory #lgbtq #march #washington #gay #lesbian

Today in Labor History October 14, 1949: 11 leaders of the US Communist party were convicted of conspiring to advocate the violent overthrow of the US government. 10 of the defendants were sentenced to 5 years in prison. The 11th was sentenced to 3 years. The Supreme Court upheld the convictions in June of 1951. The trials were part of the Smith Act trials of Communist Party leaders accused of conspiring to advocate the violent overthrow of the federal government. However, the defendants argued that they advocated a peaceful transition to socialism, and that the First Amendment guaranteed their freedom of speech and of association protected their membership in a political party. While the trial was under way, the Soviet Union tested its first nuclear weapon, and communists won the Chinese Civil War. The House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) had also begun its investigations of writers and producers during this period. Public opinion was strongly against the defendants. The judge also sentenced all five defense attorneys to imprisonment for contempt of court. Two of the attorneys were subsequently disbarred.

Today we’re seeing an attempted repeat of these events, ad absurdum, with the Trump administration labeling virtually all its enemies to be terrorists that threaten to overthrow the U.S., from Trans folks; to imaginary drug dealers in fishing boats off the coast of Venezuela; to anyone with dark skin; to those who speak out in support of Palestinians; to anyone who disses the nuclear family, capitalism, Charlie Kirk; to anyone opposed to fascism; and, of course, to anyone who’d question the supremacy cis, white male privilege.

#workingclass #LaborHistory #communism #anticommunism #witchhunt #prison #ussr #soviet #china #coldwar #freespeech #nuclear #trump #fascism #censorship

Today in Labor History October 14, 1913: The Senghenydd colliery disaster occurred in the United Kingdom, killing 439 miners. It was the country’s worst mining disaster ever. In May 1901, three underground explosions occurred at the same colliery, killing 81 miners. The cause of the 1913 explosion is unknown. 60 victims were younger than 20. 8 were only 14 years old. 542 children lost their fathers in the disaster and 205 women were widowed. The disaster is portrayed in two works of historical fiction: Alexander Cordell's “This Sweet and Bitter Earth” (1977) and “Cwmwl dros y Cwm” (2013) by Gareth F. Williams.

#workingclass #LaborHistory #coal #mining #disaster #workplacesafety #workerdeaths #historicalfiction #HisFic #novel #books #author #writer @bookstadon

Today in Labor History October 14, 1883: The two-day founding congress of the International Working People's Association (IWPA) occurred in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, at the Allegheny Turner Hall, marking the beginning of the anarchist-trade union movement in the US. Participants wore red badges and carried red flags. The congress endorsed militant labor organizing, overthrowing the state, and "propaganda by the deed," which included assassinations. Parsons, Spies, Johann Most, and others drafted the Pittsburgh Manifesto at this event. The manifesto called for the overthrow of the ruling class and replacing it with free cooperatives. The manifesto ends with the following line: “Tremble, oppressors of the world! Not far beyond your purblind sight there dawns the scarlet and sable lights of the JUDGEMENT DAY!”

Here are the basic principles called for in the manifesto:
1. Destruction of the existing class rule, by all means, i.e., by energetic, relentless, revolutionary, and international action.
2. Establishment of a free society based upon co-operative organization of production.
3. Free exchange of equivalent products by and between the productive organizations without commerce and profit-mongering.
4. Organization of education on a secular, scientific, and equal basis for both sexes.
5. Equal rights for all without distinction to sex or race.
6. Regulation of all public affairs by free contracts between the autonomous (independent) communes and associations, resting on a federalistic basis.

Preceding the IWPA was the Workingmen’s Party (WPUS), formed in Philadelphia in 1876, which played a major role in the Great Upheaval of 1877, particularly in St. Louis and Chicago. During that strike wave, over 100 workers were slaughtered by cops, Pinkertons and federal troops. Albert and Lucy Parsons were important organizers during that strike. However, the WPUS became dominated by Lasallian socialists, who opposed strikes and direct action, and believed they could vote capitalism away. The Parsons, and many others, were radicalized by the brutality against the Great Upheaval strikers, and subsequently became anarchists. The WPUS ultimately split as a result of the conflict between the anarchists, Marxists, and Lasallians, later becoming the Socialist Labor Party. And the anarchists left to form the IWPA, which helped unite Albert Parsons and August Spies and other anarchists who were later wrongly implicated in the 1886 Haymarket bombing. The subsequent witch hunt for anarchists, and the convictions and executions that followed the Haymarket bombing, effectively destroyed the IWPA.

Read my article on Lucy Parsons and the Haymarket Affair here: https://michaeldunnauthor.com/2024/03/24/lucy-parsons/

Read my article “The Wide Awakes and the Antebellum Roots of Wokeness” to learn more about the Turner Society and the radical German immigrant abolitionists in the mid- to late 1800s: https://michaeldunnauthor.com/2024/04/27/the-wide-awakes-and-the-antebellum-roots-of-wokeness/

#workingclass #LaborHistory #anarchism #lucyparsons #AlbertParsons #pittsburgh #Pinkertons #strike #union #syndicalism #marxism #socialism #directaction #abolition #haymarket #prison

#BlueCollarWriter Labor News Update - October 13, 2025:
https://www.bluecollarwriter.com/home/labor-news-update

#1u #UnionStrong #UnionYes #ItsBetterInAUnion #LaborHistory #NLRB #Jobs #Economy

Today in Labor History October 13, 1157 BCE: The first recorded strike in history began in the Egyptian town of Deir el-Medina, when construction workers walked off the job 18 days after their payday had passed because they still had not been paid. They were under the employment of Pharaoh Ramses III. Their work consisted of building and decorating the royal tombs. The strike was recorded on a Papyrus that still exists.

#workingclass #LaborHistory #strike #egypt

Today in Labor History October 13, 1970: The UK Gay Liberation Front was founded in the basement of the London School of Economics by Bob Mellors and Aubrey Walter, who had seen the effectiveness of the movement in the U.S. They published the GLF Manifesto and launched a series of high-profile direct actions, like the disruption of the launch of the Church-based morality campaign, Festival of Light.

#workingclass #LaborHistory #gayliberationfront #lgbtq #dirctaction

Today in Labor History October 13, 1909: Francisco Ferrer, founder of the Modern School movement, was executed in Spain by the Catholic Monarchists. Ferrer was an anarchist educator who opposed the Church’s monopoly over education in Spain and created that state’s first secular, co-educational schools that taught poor and affluent children side by side. On July 28, martial law was declared throughout Spain, accompanied by brutal military repression. This was in response to a series of violent confrontations between the Spanish army and anarchists, freemasons, socialists and republicans in Catalonia, caused by a draft of workers to be sent as colonial enforcers in Spanish-occupied Morocco. During a kangaroo court, Ferrer was convicted of fomenting the insurrection and was executed by firing squad on October 13, 1909. His execution led to worldwide condemnation and protests. George Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, as well as anarchists and radicals like Peter Kropotkin and Emma Goldman protested the execution. While in prison, Ferrer wrote the following on his prison wall: “Let no more gods or exploiters be served. Let us learn rather to love each other.” And when facing the firing squad, he said: “Aim well, boys. I know this is not your fault. Long live the Modern School!”

Read my article on Ferrer and the Modern School here: https://michaeldunnauthor.com/2022/04/30/the-modern-school-movement/

#workingclass #LaborHistory #anarchism #FranciscoFerrer #uprising #insurgency #spain #barcelona #catalonia #education #schools #writers #authors #deathpenalty

Today in Labor History October 13, 1902: Teddy Roosevelt threatened to send in federal troops as strikebreakers to crush a coal strike. The strike by anthracite coal miners in eastern Pennsylvania was led by the United Mineworkers of America (UMWA). The region had had dozens of previous strikes led by earlier and now defunct unions like the WBA. The UMWA was created 12 years prior, when the Knights of Labor Assembly #35 merged with the National Progressive Miners Union. Over 100,000 miners participated in the strike, threatening to cut off heating fuel for most of the country. It was also the first strike settled by federal arbitration. The miners won a 9-hour work day (down from 10) and a 10% wage increase.

This was the same region where, in 1877, 20 Irish union activists were hanged on false charges of Molly Maguire terrorism to crush the WBA, brought on by the shenanigans of agent provocateur James McParland, working for the Pinkertons. That struggle is depicted in my novel, Anywhere But Schuylkill.

Read my article on the Molly Maguires here: https://michaeldunnauthor.com/2024/04/13/the-myth-of-the-molly-maguires/

Read my article on the Pinkertons here: https://michaeldunnauthor.com/2024/04/04/union-busting-by-the-pinkertons/’

Purchase my novel:
https://www.keplers.com/
https://www.greenapplebooks.com/
https://www.historiumpress.com/michael-dunn
Or send me $25 via Venmo (@Michael-Dunn-565) and your mailing address, and I will send you a signed copy!

#workingclass #LaborHistory #coal #mining #union #strike #pennsylvania #Pinkertons #MollyMaguires #AnywhereButSchuylkill #fiction #historicalfiction #books #novel #writer #author @bookstadon

The Merchant of Death is Dead!

Alfred Nobel did not think of himself as a merchant of death. He thought of himself as a pacifist and a humanitarian. But he was really just a war profiteer and a narcissist, whose legacy of misery and death live on to this day.

Alfred Nobel was born in Stockholm, Sweden on October 21, 1833. But when he was only four, his father Immanuel moved the family to Saint Petersburg. There he set up a factory developing torpedoes and explosives. He also produced the first central heating equipment in Russia. And he also invented the veneer lathe, which was instrumental in the production of plywood.

As a child, Alfred Nobel had only eighteen months of formal schooling. But with private tutors, he learned to speak English, Russian, French and German. He was unusually intelligent, but sickly and brooding. To compensate for his weak physique, he memorized dictionaries and translated Voltaire. He particularly loved the English poets, Byron and Shelley. However, poetry was not a manly enough occupation for the son of Immanuel Nobel. So, in 1850, at the age of 17, Immanuel sent Alfred to Paris to study chemistry with Ascanio Sobrero. A few years earlier, Sobrero had invented nitroglycerin, a powerful, but incredibly unstable explosive. As a result of his fear of nitro, he kept his discovery secret for over a year. And when he finally did share his secret with Alfred, he insisted that he leave it alone.

Alfred did leave nitro alone, at least for a few years, while he went to America to further his studies in chemistry. During his four years in America, his family made armaments for the Crimean War, in which over 300,000 people died. After the war ended, the family business went under. But his older brother, Ludvig Nobel, started a new business producing cast iron shells, rifles and gun carriages for Russia. Ludvig sent their brother Robert out to purchase wood for gunstocks, but Robert invested the money in oil, instead. Thus, Robert and Ludvig became pioneers in the Russian oil industry. At one point, their Branobel Company, in Baku, Azerbaijan, produced 50% of the world’s petroleum, giving Rockefeller a good run for his money. At least until the Bolsheviks arrived, when the Nobel family was forced to sell out quickly to their nemesis Rockefeller, and his Standard Oil Company.

Alfred became a shareholder in the family oil business, but his real passion was explosives. So, he began experimenting with nitroglycerin in his family’s old armaments buildings. In 1863, he invented a detonator and blasting oil, a mixture of nitroglycerin and black powder. It was somewhat less dangerous than pure nitro and demand was high. But delivery of the stuff was risky. Deadly explosions were common. Often, the wagons were driven by drunk farm boys. To address this problem, Alfred built them one-legged stools to sit on during transport so they wouldn’t fall asleep. And to reduce casualties at work, production was done in wooden sheds, separated by earthen walls. Only one or two men were allowed to work in each shed, so that accidents couldn’t kill more than two people. Yet, in 1864, an explosion killed five employees, including his kid brother Emil.

Undeterred, Alfred continued his experiments, developing the blasting cap in 1865. In 1866, his German factory had a serious accident. However, during the clean-up process, he discovered a stable mixture of nitroglycerine and a local sand that didn’t explode when dropped or heated. He called his new invention dynamite. It quickly became key to the rapid expansion of mining and railroads and, of course, the brutal exploitation of the working class. And this, in turn, led the rapid acquisition of Gilded Age wealth.

In 1875 Nobel invented gelignite and in 1887, ballistite, a predecessor of cordite. He was living in France at the time and offered to sell the rights for the new explosive to the French government. But they declined, choosing to go with Poudre B, which had been invented by French scientists. So, he sold his ballistite to Italy. France promptly accused him of High Treason and he fled, like a thief in the night, to Sanremo, Italy.

One day, while Alfred Nobel was relaxing over breakfast, he read the following headline: “Le marchand de la mort est mort! The merchant of death is dead!” He nearly choked on his biscotti. It was a mistake, of course—it was his brother Ludvig who had died, not he. Yet the implications were obvious. The world saw him as a death monger, a murderer, not as the brilliant scientist, inventor and pacifist he thought he was. So, he decided to rewrite history. He bequeathed his entire fortune to a foundation that would award scientists, authors and do-gooders who conferred the “greatest benefit on mankind.” And for that, when most people hear his name, they think of the Nobel Prize.

During his lifetime, Alfred Nobel did indeed donate money to peace groups, but he never participated in their activities. He was friends with peace activists, like Bertha von Suttner, herself a future Nobel Peace Prize winner. But he consistently ridiculed them for being impractical and idealistic, for talking too much and doing too little. He insisted that the best strategy for creating an everlasting peace was to produce a weapon so devastating that war itself would no longer be possible. “Perhaps my factories will put an end to war sooner than your congresses: on the day that two army corps can mutually annihilate each other in a second, all civilized nations will surely recoil with horror and disband their troops.”

Almost fifty years after Nobel’s death, the first nuclear bomb was created in the U.S. Within a few years, the USSR had their own. Soon the UK, France and China had nuclear bombs, too, making the threat of mutual annihilation a reality. Yet wars still continued, even between nuclear powers. Right now, the U.S. military is at risk of potential nuclear conflicts with China and/or Russia. Thanks in part to its nuclear arsenal, Israel can bomb Palestinian civilians and assassinate Arab and Persian diplomats and scientists without fear of serious reprisals. Pakistan and India have routine and deadly skirmishes along their border, in spite of their nuclear weapons. Nobel was wrong: the threat of mutual annihilation is not bringing us closer to peace.

The same could be said for his peace prize, particularly when it’s given to people like Henry Kissinger (1973), who facilitated bloody dictatorships in Chile and Argentina, genocides in Bangladesh and East Timor, and carpet bombing of Cambodia. Or Elihu Root (1912), the U.S. Secretary of War who oversaw the brutal repression of the Filipino independence movement. And let’s not forget Shimon Peres, Yitzak Rabin and Yasser Arafat (1994), who jointly won the Nobel Peace Prize despite their histories of human rights abuses. Or Aung San Suu Kyi (1991), who has denied the genocide against the Rohingya. Or Cordell Hull (1945), who, in 1939, led the opposition to accepting a boatload of Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany into America. As a result, the boat was redirected back to Germany, where one quarter of its passengers were exterminated.

And there are so many other recent examples, like Barack Obama (2009), who did virtually nothing for world peace prior to becoming president, but after the prize began assassinating civilians with his drones and arresting more immigrants than his predecessor, George W. Bush. Or Mikhail Gorbachev (1990), who sent tanks into the Baltic republics less than a year after winning his “peace” prize, killing numerous civilians.

And older examples, like Woodrow Wilson (1919), who sent troops to occupy Nicaragua and the Dominican Republic, and to “intervene” in Cuba, Honduras and Panama. He also oversaw the Palmer raids that led to over 10,000 arrests and over 500 deportations of union leaders, peace activists, socialists and anarchists. And he was an outright racist and apologist for slavery. Or Menachem Begin (1978), who four years after receiving his “peace” prize launched the bloody invasion of Lebanon, and who refused to fire Ariel Sharon, even after the Kahan Commission found Sharon culpable for the Sabra and Shatila massacre and recommended that he be removed from office.

It is also worth mentioning that Nobel owned Bofors, which he converted from a steel producer to an armament’s manufacturer, and which continues to make heavy weaponry to this day. It is now a subsidiary of United Defense Industries, an American corporation. And Dynamit Nobel, a descendant of a company Nobel created during his lifetime, continued to make weapons well into the 1990s.

Alfred Nobel died in Sanremo, Italy, in 1896, alone and depressed, not surprising for a man who valued profits and weapons over human relationships. During his lifetime, he traveled a lot for business, but despised and mistrusted his business associates. As a result, he developed few, if any, lasting friendships. Victor Hugo called him the wealthiest vagabond in Europe. He was worth $250 million at the time of his death. His Paris estate had an enormous library, stables for his collection of Russian horses, and greenhouses for his orchids. Yet he seldom seemed happy. He suffered migraines and illness throughout his life and he never got married.

Some said he was a misanthrope, possibly a misogynist. Supposedly, he didn’t think much of democracy, either, and he opposed women’s suffrage. Nevertheless, people still seem to associate his name more with peace and scientific progress than with death and warfare. In this respect, Nobel was a booming success.

#workingclass #LaborHistory #nobel #nobelprize #war #humanrights #imperialism

Today in Labor History October 12, 1998: Matthew Shepard died from injuries sustained after being beaten and tortured in a homophobic assault in Laramie, Wyoming. The crime led to numerous attempts to enact new anti-hate crime laws at the local and federal level. All were opposed by conservative groups and most failed. It wasn’t until 2009 that the Matthew Shepard Act was finally signed into law. NBA player Jason Collins wore jersey number “98” in honor of Matthew Shepard during the 2021-2013 season, before coming out himself. “The Laramie Project” was a play about Matthew Shepard’s life and death, written by Moisés Kaufman and members of the Tectonic Theater Project. Two men were convicted for the murder, both receiving 2 consecutive life sentences.

#workingclass #LaborHistory #lgbtq #homophobia #laramie #MatthewShepard #writer #books #HateCrime #play #playwright #theater @bookstadon

Today in Labor History October 12, 1892: The Pledge of Allegiance was first recited by U.S. school children, without any mention of god. The Pledge went through several iterations over the following decades, but it was not until 1954 that the word “god” was added to it, to ingrain in U.S. children how much superior they were to the godless communists in the USSR.

#workingclass #LaborHistory #patriotism #ussr #ColdWar #anticommunism #communism #school #children #god #atheism

Today in Labor History October 12, 1898: A gun battle at the Chicago-Virden Coal Company, in Virden, Illinois, killed 8 coal miners and 5 private detectives, during the Virden Massacre. The Company hired the private cops to protect African-American strikebreakers they had brought in by train to operate their mine during the strike. 30 members of the UMWA were injured, as were several of the strikebreakers. The UMWA told the black miners they would be cared for if they came to the union hall. But the next day, the UMWA told them that their protection would end at 6 pm that evening. After that, Virden became a sundown town and most black miners were expelled. The mayor of Springfield sent the African American workers to East Saint Louis by train and abandoned them there without money, food or warm clothes. The governor then mustered the National Guard to prevent any more black strikebreakers from entering the state, telling his soldiers that if another train tried to enter the state, they should “shoot it to pieces with Gatling guns.” The next month, the mine owners recognized the union and agreed to keep the workers segregated. Virden remained a sundown town for decades after that.

Ever since Bacon’s Rebellion in 1676, the wealthy have been exploiting race to pit workers against each other, provoking mistrust, hatred, and violence. It was common for bosses to bring in African American replacement workers during strikes and lie to them about their employment status, deny that there was a strike going on, promise them equal treatment. Even when strikes were not going on, employers would (and still do) hire workers from different backgrounds, races, genders, ethnicities, ages, at different pay, status and working conditions, in order to divide them and sow mistrust among them. The mine owners of eastern Pennsylvania were infamous for this in the late 1800s. My novel, Anywhere But Schuylkill, shows how they’d hire native whites and English immigrants as the mine bosses and foremen, at the highest pay and status; Welsh and German miners as “skilled” or “contract” miners and engineers, at a middling pay and status; and Irish as Laborers at the lowest pay and status. They’d also hire Welsh workers to moonlight as coal cops, provoking sectarian violence between them and the Irish. And when the workers managed to overcome their mistrust, and unite in solidarity during a strike, the bosses would simply offer the higher status workers a tiny raise and that would often be enough to get them to break solidarity and bust the strike.

But these tactics did not always work. During the Matewan strike in West Virginia, in 1920, union organizers were able to successfully unite Italian immigrants, black workers who had initially been hired as scabs, and local whites, and to maintain solidarity between them, in spite of evictions and attacks by gun thugs. During the Great Upheaval of 1877, a 4-month nationwide labor uprising in which cops and National Guards slaughtered 100 people, black and white workers united in solidarity in Saint Louis, taking over the city in a Commune that lasted for several days. Black longshoremen in Galveston, Texas won a raise, inspiring white workers to join them. In Louisville, Kentucky, black sewer workers initiated a strike wave that quickly included coopers, textile workers, brick makers, cabinet workers and factory workers. Throughout the south, black workers demanded equal pay to whites and, in many cases, won it.

In 1887, the predominantly white Knights of Labor organized and supported black sugarcane workers in New Orleans. However, white paramilitaries attacked the strike, slaughtering up to 50 black workers. The KOL were unique for their time, organizing men, women, immigrants and black workers in one big union. However, even they weren’t immune to racism, xenophobia, and propaganda from the bosses and yellow press. Indeed, they were the primary culprits behind the Rock Springs Massacre of 1883, in Wyoming, where they slaughtered up to 50 immigrant Chinese miners and drove the survivors from town because they believed the Chinese workers were taking their jobs and driving down wages.

In the 1910s, the IWW were famous for organizing workers regardless of race, nationality, religion, gender, or employment status. Ben Fletcher, an African American longshoreman in Philadelphia, was one of the union’s most effective organizers. He successfully united black, native whites, Polish and Irish immigrants, giving the IWW control of nearly every dock in town. They also had considerable success at other ports along the eastern seaboard. The IWW was also instrumental in the multi-ethnic strike against United Fruit, in New Orleans, in 1913. Frank Little, a Cherokee worker, was another of the IWW’s top organizers. He helped organize oil workers, timber workers, and migrant farm workers in California, and helped pioneer many of the passive resistance techniques later used by the Civil Rights movement. He was lynched by vigilantes, during the Anaconda miners’ strike in 1917.

For the sake of space and time, I’m going to limit my discussion to these historical examples from the late 1800s to the 1910s. However, there are many more examples of worker solidarity across race, gender, ethnicity, and sexual orientation, particularly in the mid- to late 20th century.

Read more about the Great Upheaval here: https://michaeldunnauthor.com/2024/03/31/the-great-upheaval/

Read more about the Matewan massacre here: https://michaeldunnauthor.com/2024/04/14/the-battle-of-blair-mountain/

Read more about Ben Fletcher here: https://michaeldunnauthor.com/2021/05/13/ben-fletcher-and-the-iww-dockers/

Read more about Frank Little here https://michaeldunnauthor.com/2024/04/05/frank-little/

You can pick up my novel, ANYWHERE BUT SCHUYLKILL at
https://www.keplers.com/
https://www.greenapplebooks.com/
https://www.historiumpress.com/michael-dunn
Or send me $25 via Venmo (@Michael-Dunn-565) and your mailing address, and I will send you a signed copy!

#workingclass #LaborHistory #virden #massacre #illinois #coal #mining #strike #union #scabs #racism #police #PoliceBrutality #IWW

Today in Labor History October 11, 1937: Polish-Jewish anarchist activist, Aniela Wolberg, died unexpectedly during surgery. She cofounded the underground newspaper Proletariat at a time when it was illegal to publish anarchist ideas in Poland. In 1926 she became a member of the Anarchist Federation of Poland, before moving to Paris later that year. In France, she worked with Walka, a Polish journal of anarchism, and became friends with the Chinese anarchist writer Ba Jin, who would write two short stories about her, Yalianna (1931) and Yalianna Woboerge (1933). In 1927 she was a delegate, along with Nestor Makhno and others, at a committee to discuss forming an anarchist international. In 1932, she was deported back to Poland. To earn a living, she worked as a chemical engineer and, later, as a bacteriologist. It is believed by some, though unconfirmed, that she also worked as an organizer with the CNT at the beginning of the Spanish war against fascism.

#workingclass #LaborHistory #anarchism #anielawolberg #poland #spain #fascism #antifa #antifascism #fiction #books #writer @bookstadon

Today in Labor History October 11, 1884: Striking miners in New Straitsville, Ohio pushed burning coal cars into six local mines, igniting a fire that continues to burn to this day. They did it in order to prevent scab workers from operating the mine. However, the fire permanently ended all work at the mine. Over 200 square miles of coal deposits have now burned. At some points, the fire burned so strong that it could be seen from miles away. Tourists came to cook eggs and brew coffee at the site, while locals are said to have pulled water up from their wells that was hot enough to brew coffee.

#workingclass #LaborHistory #mining #coal #sabotage #strike #ohio

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TIGKNm7jvQo

Today in Labor History October 11, 1944: The Soviet Union annexed the Tuvan People's Republic, which had been an independent socialist republic for the previous 23 years. “Tuva or Bust,” (1991) is a book by Ralph Leighton about his attempt to travel to Tuva with his friend, physicist Richard Feynman. They became intrigued with getting to the remote destination in the middle of Central Asia and spent a decade trying to do it. Feynman died of cancer shortly before their visas finally arrived. The bumper sticker “Tuva or Bust” was featured in the film “Genghis Blues,” about San Francisco blues singer Paul Pena’s trip to Tuva to perform in their national Throat Singing competition. Pena was a blind rock and blues musician from San Francisco who taught himself Tuvan throat singing by listening to it on shortwave radio. Feynman made major contributions to the fields of Quantum Mechanics and superfluidity and won the Nobel Prize in 1965.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-_xlbCq0WTw

#workingclass #LaborHistory #soviet #communism #ussr #tuva #richardfeynman #physics #nobelprize #blues #paulpena #socialism #books #writer #author @bookstadon

Today in Labor History October 11, 1906: San Francisco ordered the segregation of all Asian children in schools until Teddy Roosevelt forced the city to rescind the order. It sparked a diplomatic crisis between the U.S. and Japan.

Read America’s Long Sordid History of Anti-Asian Violence here: https://michaeldunnauthor.com/2021/03/21/americas-long-sordid-history-of-anti-asian-violence/

#workingclass #LaborHistory #racism #xenophobia #AntiAsianHate #sanfrancisco #japan #schools #children

Today in Labor History October 11, 1865: Hundreds of black men and women, led by preacher Paul Bogle, marched in Jamaica, starting the Morant Bay rebellion. The former slaves rose in rebellion against injustice and poverty. Most were prevented from voting by high poll taxes. Recently, living conditions had worsened because of floods, cholera and smallpox epidemics, and a long drought. When the militia killed seven men, the protesters attacked and burned the courthouse and nearby buildings. Twenty-five people died. Bogle was arrested and charged with inciting to riot. The governor declared martial law, ordering troops to hunt down the rebels. They killed at least 400 more people, including women and children. They arrested over 300. Many of them were innocent, but nonetheless convicted and executed.

#workingclass #LaborHistory #jamaica #MorantBay #rebellion #rebel #slavery #abolition #massacre #riot #racism #poverty #BlackMastodon