1860s
Secret Societies and the First International - Boris I. Nicolaevsky
The influence of a radical-democratic offshoot of freemasonry on the formation of the First International.
"B. I. Nicolaevsky was Curator of the Menshevik collection at the Hoover Institution. An active member of the Russian Social Democratic Party, he became Director of the Moscow Marx-Engels Institute after the revolution of 1917. Deported from Russia in 1922, he later became Director of the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam."
Originally published in "The Revolutionary Internationals, 1864-1943"; ed. Milorad M. Drachovitch, Stanford University Press, 1966.
1860: The Lynn shoe strike
Howard Zinn's history of the strike of 20,000 US shoe manufacturing workers - men and women - in New England. Lasting several weeks, the strike won wage increases for the poorly-paid workers.
10. The Other Civil War
A sheriff in the Hudson River Valley near Albany, New York, about to go into the hills in the fall
of 1839 to collect back rents from tenants on the enormous Rensselaer estate, was handed a letter:
... the tenants have organized themselves into a body, and resolved not to pay any more rent until
