An essential compendium of reflections on the reviled, glorious, and voltaic occasion of May 1st, the international May Day holiday
May 1st is a day that once made the rich and powerful cower in fear and caused Parliament to ban the Maypole—a magnificent and riotous day of rebirth, renewal, and refusal. This book’s reflections on the Red and the Green—out of which arguably the only hope for the future lies—are populated by the likes of Native American anarchocommunist Lucy Parsons, the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement, Karl Marx, José Martí, W. E. B. Du Bois, Rosa Luxemburg, SNCC, and countless others, both sentient and verdant. The book is a forceful reminder of the potentialities of the future, for the coming of a time when the powerful will fall, the commons restored, and a better world born anew.
About the Author
Peter Linebaugh is a historian and a professor at the University of Toledo. He is the author of The London Hanged, The Magna Carta Manifesto, and Stop, Thief!, and the coauthor of Albion’s Fatal Tree and The Many Headed Hydra. His articles have appeared in publications that include CounterPunch, the New Left Review, New York University Law Review, Radical History Review, and Social History. He lives in Toledo, Ohio.
Praise For…
“There is not a more important historian living today. Period.” —Robin D. G. Kelley, author, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination
“E. P. Thompson, you may rest now. Linebaugh restores the dignity of the despised luddites with a poetic grace worthy of the master.” —Mike Davis, author, Planet of Slums
“Ideas can be beautiful too, and the ideas Peter Linebaugh provokes and maps in this history of liberty are dazzling reminders of what we have been and who we could be.” —Rebecca Solnit, author, Storming the Gates of Paradise
"Written to mark May Day, the international workers’ holiday, Linebaugh’s 11 playful and elegiac treatises motivate, enrage, and inform." —Publishers Weekly
"Like his other works, Peter Linebaugh leaves you dazzled, full of great optimism and the sense that the world is much smaller and an end to Capital much closer than you ever dared hope." —Rhyd Wildermuth, godsandradicals.org
"Linebaugh goes a long way towards encouraging and fanning radical socialist dreaming and scheming in the present, dreaming not as escape but as opening a door to possibilities, and creating a light on the hill for the future." —Rowan Cahill, Labour History Melbourne
"The historical details Linebaugh uncovers are fascinating and the links to contemporary events are inspiring." —Mark Krantz, socialistreview.org.uk
