Radical History: The Triangle Factory Fire

Tomorrow is the 100th anniversary of the fire at the Triangle Shirt Factory, which occurred in a garment sweatshop and killed almost fifty people, many of them (of course) immigrant women working in terrible conditions for almost no money. It was such a shock to people that it helped push the call for unions in the US. It's an important part of our history, and should be on everyone's lips tomorrow. Some resources for you to learn about it:

Of course, from Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States. It's free online, but you'll have to scroll down to find it in this chapter. No, you know what? Fuck that: read the whole chapter, then the rest of the book.

There's also a good article with video here about it, and another good article connecting it to the modern labor struggle here.

Our lack of knowledge of history is a very dangerous thing. The old trope that those who are ignorant of history are doomed to repeat it gets it exactly wrong. Those who are ignorant of history live in a constant now, and contingent historical facts seem like universal necessities -- the fact that we happen to have the current political-economic system we do, the social classes that currently exist, our ways of speaking or eating or living or whatever -- these can be seen as natural if we aren't aware of the many other ways things have been. Even more importantly than this, history shows us the way things might have been and therefore might be: the Spanish revolution, the Paris Commune, or John Brown's rebellion, just to name a few, are all clear beacons of what we could have if we work for it (OK, that isn't as pity as Santayana had it, but it's truer).

So go learn some history, and today's anniversary can be a good way to start.