The Ingenuity team has nicknamed the spot where the helicopter completed its final flight “Valinor Hills” after the fictional location in J.R.R. Tolkien’s fantasy novels, which include “The Lord of the Rings” trilogy.
Today in Labor History March 12, 1912: The IWW won their Bread and Roses textile strike in Lawrence, MA. This was the first strike to use the moving picket line, implemented to avoid arrest for loitering. The workers came from 51 different nationalities and spoke 22 different languages. The mainstream unions, including the American Federation of Labor, all believed it was impossible to organize such a diverse workforce. However, the IWW organized workers by linguistic group and trained organizers who could speak each of the languages. Each language group got a delegate on the strike committee and had complete autonomy. Big Bill Haywood and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn masterminded the strategy of sending hundreds of the strikers' hungry children to sympathetic families in New York, New Jersey, and Vermont, drawing widespread sympathy, especially after police violently stopped a further exodus. 3 workers were killed by police during the strike. Nearly 300 were arrested.
The 1911 verse, by Poet James Oppenheim, has been associated with the strike, particularly after Upton Sinclair made the connection in his 1915 labor anthology, “The Cry for Justice: An Anthology of the Literature of Social Protest”
As we come marching, marching, we battle too for men,
For they are women's children, and we mother them again.
Our lives shall not be sweated from birth until life closes;
Hearts starve as well as bodies; give us bread, but give us roses!
Today in Labor History November 5, 1916: The Everett Massacre occurred in Everett, Washington. 300 IWW members arrived by boat in Everett to help support the shingle workers’ strike that had been going on for the past 5 months. Prior attempts to support the strikers were met with vigilante beatings with axe handles. As the boat pulled in, Sheriff McRae called out, “Who’s your leader?” The Wobblies answered, “We’re all leaders!” The sheriff pulled his gun and said, “You can’t land.” A Wobbly yelled back, “Like hell we can’t.” Gunfire erupted, most of it from the 200 vigilantes on the dock. When the smoke cleared, two of the sheriff’s deputies were dead, shot in the back by their own men, along with 5-12 Wobblies on the boat. Dozens more were wounded. The authorities arrested 74 Wobblies. After a trial, all charges were dropped against the IWW members. The event was mentioned in John Dos Passos’s “USA Trilogy.”
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, which you can purchase here: https://www.thehistoricalfictioncompany.com/michael-dunn
Today in Labor History August 14, 1791: Dutty Boukman led a Vodou ceremony with enslaved people from Saint Domingue plantations that led to the start of the Haitian Revolution, the largest slave uprising since the Spartacist revolt against the Romam empire. Boukman was born in Senegambia. His name, Boukman, came from the English “Book Man,” because he not only knew how to read, but taught other enslaved people how to read. He, and priestess Cécile Fatiman, had led a series of meetings with enslaved people prior to August 14 to organized and plan for the uprising. Boukman was killed by French troops a few months into the revolution. Trinidadian Marxist writer C. L. R. James wrote the best book on the Haitian Revolution: “The Black Jacobins,” (1938). Also, be sure to check out the wonderful music of the contemporary Haitian pop group, Boukman Eksperyans, named for the Haitian revolutionary, Dutty Boukman. A fictionalized version of Boukman plays the title character in Guy Endore's novel “Babouk,” an anti-capitalist parable about the Haitian Revolution.
I’m writing a #heist#novel in a #solarpunk / #climate#scifi setting. Here’s the draft of the first chapter — let me know what you think! I’ll be publishing a new chapter each week:
Today in Labor History December 5, 1928: The Colombian military slaughtered up to 2,000 people in the Banana Massacre. Workers had been on strike against United Fruit Company since November 12. They were participating in a peaceful demonstration, with their wives and children. The Columbian troops set up machine guns on the rooftops near the demonstration and closed off the access streets so no one could escape. The soldiers threw the dead into mass graves or dumped them in the sea. U.S. officials in Colombia had portrayed the workers as communists and subversives and even threatened to invade if the Colombian government didn’t protect United Fruit’s interests. Gabriel García Márquez depicted the massacre in his novel “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” as did Álvaro Cepeda Samudio in his “La Casa Grande.”
United Fruit, which is now called Chiquita, controlled vast quantities of territory in Central America, and the Caribbean, maintained a near monopoly in many of the banana republics in which it operated (e.g., Honduras, Guatemala, Costa Rica). By 1930, it was the largest employer in Central America and the largest land owner. In 1952, the government of Jacobo Arbenz, in Guatemala, began giving away unused land, owned by United Fruit, to landless peasants. In 1954, the CIA deposed the Arbenz government, leading to decades of brutal dictatorship and genocide of Guatemala’s indigenous population. The head of the CIA at that time was former board member of United Fruit, Allen Dulles, who also oversaw the over throw of the democratically elected prime minister of Iran, the Bay of Pigs invasion, and the MK Ultra LSD mind control experiments.
Today in Labor History October 21, 1894: French anarchists incited a revolt on the penal colony of Île Saint-Joseph, in the Salvation Islands of French Guiana, which included the infamous Devil’s Island. The revolt was a response to the guards killing an anarchist prisoner. The uprising was quickly put down, with the guards slaughtering several anarchists, and torturing many more, some of whom later died from their wounds. Captain Alfred Dreyfus was held there (1895-98) after his wrongful, antisemitic conviction for treason. Charles Delescluze, libertarian socialist and future leader of the Paris Commune, was sent there in 1853. Clément Duval, a member of the Panther of Batignolles anarchist gang of robbers, spent 14 years on Devil’s Island, making 20 escape attempts. In 1901, he succeeded and fled to New York, where lived until his death at the age of 85. The first political prisoners brought to Guiana were Jacobins, in 1794. Numerous slave rebellions also occurred in the colony, until slavery was finally abolished, in the wake of the 1848 French Revolution. The novel and film “Papillon” takes place there, as does Joseph Conrad's short story “An Anarchist” (1906). Delescluze, who was killed on the barricades during the Commune, wrote an account of his imprisonment in Guiana, “De Paris à Cayenne, Journal d'un transporté.” And Duval wrote about it in his 1929 memoir, “Outrage: An Anarchist Memoir of the Penal Colony.” Guiana is the only continental South American territory to remain a European colony into the 21st century.
"Accuracy is so important to me,” Goyhood #author Reuven Fenton told The Algemeiner. “People assume that the ultra-Orthodox #Jewish community is the Jewish version of the Taliban and that’s not true at all.”
“Whenever you see anything media-oriented that has to do with Orthodox #Jews, if you’re part of that world in any way, you look at it and roll your eyes because they never get it right. It’s full of flaws, exaggerations, and misinformation,” added the first-time author, who is also the only Orthodox Jewish reporter on staff for the New York Post. “I felt it was my obligation, [and] that the least I could do in writing this #novel was to get everything on the money.”
The 29th chapter of my hard #scifi#SpaceOpera is released! This is the penultimate "normal" chapter, most likely. In it, some loose ends about the book's worldbuilding are tied, and a plot point from many chapters ago is finally resolved. While the tension is lower, the heat is still rising...
Today in Labor History October 5, 1923: Swedish anarcho-syndicalist playwright & novelist Stig Dagerman was born. Over the course of 5 years, 1945–49, he wrote four successful novels, a collection of short stories, a book about postwar Germany, five plays, hundreds of poems and satirical verses, several essays and a large amount of journalism. He wrote the essay “Anarchism and Me” about his views on anarchism, and society, in post-World War 2 Europe. He killed himself in 1954, by running his car with the garage closed.
Today in Writing History January 19, 1809: Edgar Allan Poe was born. “The Raven” made Poe an overnight sensation. Yet, he spent much of his life in poverty. Poe originally considered having an owl or parrot, rather than a raven, quote “Nevermore.” Poe was a binge drinker who sometimes remained sober for months before falling off the wagon again. His alcoholism worsened as he got older. He died in 1849, mostly likely from alcoholism. His grave remained unmarked until 1865. For 60 years, from 1949 until 2009, the “Poe Toaster” left a bottle of cognac and three roses on Poe’s grave every January 19th.
Today in Labor History November 20, 1820: An 80-ton sperm whale attacked and sunk the Essex, a whaling ship from Nantucket, Massachusetts. The tragedy occurred off the western coast of South America. 7 members of the 20-man crew died at sea, as they attempted to make land in the lifeboats. Survivors ate their dead comrades to stay alive. The story inspired Herman Melville to write his 1851 novel Moby-Dick. And it inspired modern day orcas to organize and fight back to reclaim the seas from humans.
Today in Labor History December 2, 1859: The authorities hanged abolitionist John Brown in Charleston, Virginia for his leadership of a plot to incite a slave rebellion. Victor Hugo, who was living in exile on Guernsey, tried to obtain a pardon for him. His open letter was published by the press on both sides of the Atlantic. His plea failed, of course. On the day of his execution, John Brown rode in a furniture wagon, on top of his own coffin, through a crowd of 2,000 soldiers, to the gallows. The soldiers included future Confederate general Stonewall Jackson and John Wilkes Booth. Walt Whitman described the execution in his poem “Year of Meteors.”
Today in Labor History February 27, 1902: John Steinbeck was born on this date in Salinas, California. He wrote numerous novels from the perspective of farmers and working-class people, including “The Grapes of Wrath,” “Tortilla Flats” “Of Mice and Men,” “Cannery Row,” and “East of Eden.” In 1935, he joined the communist League of American Writers. He faced contempt charges for refusing to cooperate with HUAC. The FBI and the IRS harassed him throughout his career. Yet he wrote glowingly about U.S. troops during the Vietnam War. He won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1962 and the Pulitzer in 1939.
"In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort."...
The 28th chapter of my hard #scifi#SpaceOpera is released! More serious and permanent damage to the ship! More worldbuilding, specifically about the origins of the main villains (if unseen ones)-- the dal-ghar. And finally, the entry into the last leg of the journey until Ilsh...
The Neverending Story - 1984 - starring Noah Hathaway, Barret Oliver and Alan Oppenheimer. Co-written and directed by Wolfgang Petersen, based on the 1979 novel by Michael Ende. (movie-web.app)
Never give up and good luck will find you....
The Hobbit - 1977 - Animated film by Topcraft Studio (pre-Studio Ghibli) based on JRR Tolkien's 1937 novel (movie-web.app)
"In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort."...