Remember, everything we have from safety regulations to weekends to OT was paid for in blood. The capitalist never gave it freely.
Yeah, they like to play it off as people dying on the job. It’s never framed as people having their heads cracked in by literal FBI agents and mercenaries paid for with tax dollars. It was both. it’s always been both.
Literally the first military aerial bombardment in [edit: US] history. US Army planes bombing American civilians.
first on north american soil, not in all history. WWII had its first aerial bombing in 1916 or 1917 and Blair mountain was 1921.
That’s were the term “red necks” came from fyi
i have a red bandana that the Mattewan chapter of the UMWA gave me that says “certified redneck” on it. it is my proudest possession.
and i want to say something about those rednecks up in McDowell county. they gave my friend Alice the same bandana. she was there in her hippy dress with her full beard. and they were happy to see her because she’s their friend and they’re hers.
also worth knowing, the red bandana is the symbol of the unionist movement in appalachia because of what each color represents:
- red: labor, collective action, and indigenous rights
- white: white laborers
- black: black laborers
our red bandana was selected to represent our anti-racist ethos. it has been our symbol for around 140 years now. and i’ll be damned if i let any of my neighbors forget who we are or where we come from.
This is why you can’t let them convince you that only nonviolent solutions are acceptable. The state will always wield violence against anything it perceives as a threat. Change is often written in blood. Don’t let them cow you into learned helplessness.
This is the kind of history that needs to be tought in 2026.
Working class people in the coal mining region of west virginia today: “Keep those filthy socialists out of our government! We don’t want our tax money paying for welfare for the needy!”
…while also being on welfare…
They’ll learn fast when the robber barrons slink back.
That’s optimistic of you.
Ah fuck.
But that map doesn’t even extend to West Virginia. Looks like most of it is concentrated in Maine.
The Appalachain Rainforest is resource rich, they always come back.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appalachian_temperate_rainforest?wprov=sfla1
Capital has been festering division for most of this country’s history. It used racism to keep labor weak.
“private planes” including the air national guard. our war for weekends wasn’t just against Baldwin Felts. We got confronted by the entire state apparatus.
Remember, between giving works a modicum of rights or being interested in capital, the USA government has favored the later heavily to the former.
money is just a proxy for violence
Listening to A People’s History of the United States has been a revelation.
The beginning is so sad
Note that rebellions against authority aren’t ever really acknowledged in US education unless its a rebellion for worse authoritarianism, like the Confederacy.
I graduated high school in the late 90s in white christian suburbia USA. It’s definitely unnerving how often I get to go down a rabbit hole about events that happened before I was born but are still new to me.
That’s especially true when the “rebellion” is something other than war or occasionally civil rights. Anything related to labor or worker’s rights just didn’t come up.
But then I had to keep learning about the world from as many sources as possible, and instead of fulfilling my destiny to be an angry unwell rich republican, here I am on Lemmy and spending more time thinking about my family, hobbies, and farm chores than about work. I use Debian btw.
That’s just not true. The Haymarket Riot is widely taught in history classes. I don’t think there’s a single history class that covers the 20th century and fails to mention the Great Depression and the New Deal. They might not spend a lot of time on things like the Bonus Army, but you can’t really cover the Great Depression without mentioning rebellions and unrest.
It’s true that they like to talk a lot more about the genius of Henry Ford and give him credit for the 5 day work week, and not mention all the labour movements and strikes that led to the 8 hour day and 5 day week. But, it’s more a matter of what’s emphasized rather than outright censorship.
Besides, the whole founding of the US is framed as a rebellion against authority. They barely even mention that the founding fathers were almost all extremely rich nepo babies. The founding story of the US could be taught as a bunch of rich white men who deserved to lead because of their prowess as capitalists taking power from a distant king who was demanding a bailout due to his financial mismanagement. That would probably even be closer to the truth. But, it’s framed as a bunch of plucky men taking power back for the people from an autocrat.
where are you that the Haymarket Square Incident is covered? i didn’t learn about it until after college
It is in the AP US History curriculum under topic 6.7. If you’re taking the AP class, you’ll probably hear about it. If not, it would depend on what your state and local school district wants to teach.
Right, so not necessarily widely at all.
Yeah, but it would explain why a lot of people may have heard about it in high school, even if they grew up in a conservative part of the country.
I would expect that Lemmy skews more towards students on the college track than the national average, which is why a collection of anecdotes here may be different than the national average.
My high school American Literature class mentioned the unrest of the Great Depression more than my history classes did.
American history class quickly rushed past (or skipped outright) everything after the Civil War to get to WWI, the Great Depression pretty much just as a leadup to WWII, WWII for like two months, then a little bit of the Civil Rights movement.
In college we spent a lot more time on those gaps, which is what all the “liberal brainwashing” is about.
I was pissed when I got to college and learned the truth about the black panthers, police history, labor history, etc. it’s not ALL bad either. Vigilance committees in some places were actually pretty okay by some standards. The Montana Vigilance Committee for example. Still, it wasn’t even college. It was the internet. It was teaching myself by listening to podcasts, reading books, watching videos on old YT that were more than 2 minutes long.
And the civil rights movement is mostly about peaceful protests, like sit ins. It’ll spend a long time talking about MLK, but, at best, mentions Malcolm X, but doesn’t go into any detail, unless it’s to say it’s wrong.
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Not true I heard about the Whiskey Rebellion and Shays Rebellion at least once
Moreover, history books often ignore the inhuman conditions these workers were forced to endure. Look up the Hawk’s Nest Tunnel. They knew how dangerous it was; they knew the workers would be dead within a year(they chewed through them in 3-6 months. Still, they made them work with no protection at all. Fighting takes more than just holding a sign.
Genuinely interesting. Thanks for the share.
meanwhile on the other side of the pond, the shooting of five striking paper mill workers 10 years later was enough to trigger national protests and caused legal shockwaves throughout the century, even influencing post-9/11 terrorism laws.
one thing probably lead to the conditions that enabled the other
The struggle for emancipation is global when resisting a system of global oppression
the global network of capital essentially functions to separate the worker from the means of production at the benefit of a bloodthirsty pedophillic elite
Behind the Bastards did an Episode on this. Wild shit.
IIRC, The Pinkertons got their claim to
fameinfamy during that strike as strikebreakers.And they’re still around. Still shady af
it was Baldwin-Felts, but at the end of the day pinks are pinks even if their paychecks get written by another private “detective” agency
The only good Pinkerton…
Yes, thank you! The Pinkertons are right bastards but they weren’t involved in this very specific union busting scrum. Just, you know… *waves hands vaguely… all of that
I remember my history textbook mentioning Blair Mountain, but the curriculum (which didn’t have nearly enough time to actually cover all the material in the textbook, even just in the period we were focusing on) didn’t mention it at all.
C’est la vie. Or c’est la underfunded and poorly organized public school system.
As I remember it, the reason we didn’t have enough time to cover the rest of the book is that we spent a full 6-7 years learning about WWII repeatedly. Like the same fucking curriculum multiple years.
As I remember it, the reason we didn’t have enough time to cover the rest of the book is that we spent a full 6-7 years learning about WWII repeatedly. Like the same fucking curriculum multiple years.
Ah, the good old “We’re not sure what the previous class was teaching so let’s redo the whole thing” level of public school coordination.
Didn’t you know? The history of the US was 97% compromised of the Revolution, the Civil War, and World War II.
I would assume it’s not just poorly funded, but that the decision makers have a strong interest in what gets focus.
I had some classes entirely directed by the AP tests. My AP us history teacher took each years test and calculated the percentage of questions per period.
So we spent an absurd time on reconstruction
So we spent an absurd time on reconstruction
tbf, there are worse periods to focus on
I wouldn’t say we actually covered much of anything beyond factoids to be repeated.
No real understanding of the period
that’s a political, not a financial decision
That is something that came out of the Texas textbooks. Nobody really paid any attention to whoever was running a scame of the price of textbooks.
I’m not sure how that gets taught in homeschool programs (once again one and you’d just expect some scammers).
They sure went after school boards though.
