I've had a lot of fun at the International Brigades Memorial events this weekend, but I left the buffet dinner fairly quickly (emailing apols to the lovely couple who were next to me) because of someone else on the table.How can someone call himself an internationalist and wear an International Brigade t-shirt, and be a Lexiter?
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Went to a lecture on Tom Wintringham and a music event by the International Brigades Memorial Association last night - excellent. More commemorative stuff today. It’s curious how nowadays the legacy of the Home Guard (in which my maternal grandfather served) is defined by the whimsy of Dad’s Army and not by its roots in the experience of ( Read more... )

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Helen Keller was also a Wobbly (member of IWW), campaigned to try to save Joe Hill from execution, and faced McCarthyist persecution: she’d welcomed back US volunteers from the Spanish Civil War.

From the 1916 interview to which I’ve linked (in which she also speaks approvingly of the French Revolution):

“I was religious to start with” she began ( Read more... )

Happy Birthday to the man who put the comma into Red, Hot and Swedish…
Joel Emmanuel Hägglund, who used the pen-name “Joe Hill”, born in Gävle, 7 October 1879;
Judicially murdered in Salt Lake City, 19 November 1915.

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“At the McDowall County Courthouse, they shot Sid Hatfield down,
So I’ll meet you on Blair Mountain…”
(I find it horribly ironic how this part of the US has voted, given the sacrifices of those commemorated in this song.)

I like the sound of this new play about the indomitable Louise Michel…

Interesting tip on lapis lazuli ( Read more... )

So, I'm 50; I'm back from Italy; back at work; and have a lot to do ( Read more... )

From the Boss.
Youngstown reminds me of the iron and steel men in my own family (the Black Country/French side): iron forge workers and puddlers.

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Am feeling pretty keen with the leadership elections coming up: have switched my union political fund contribution from unaffiliated to affiliated, so I can vote. Time to take back the party…

...don't always look the way you expect. Sometimes they knock you sideways - or, as per my friend Eileen, reduce you to drooling incoherence - as Joe did through looking like a male model in his prison record mugshots (see icon ( Read more... )