Today's Labor History

Click here to check out this week's Labor History Today podcast. On this week's show: heroic martyr and visionary or madman and terrorist? Leon Fink on abolitionist John Brown (see below). Art historian Alexander Nemerov on why Lewis Hine’s powerful photographs of young children at work still speak to us today. Plus fascinating finds illuminating "Labor’s Magna Carta" in the Meany Labor Archives and four different versions of "John Brown's Body."

Queen Marie Antoinette, wife of Louis XVI, is beheaded during the French Revolution. When alerted that the peasants were suffering due to widespread bread shortages, lore has it that she replied, “Let them eat cake.” In fact she never said that, but workers were, justifiably, ready to believe anything bad about their cold-hearted royalty - 1793
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Abolitionist John Brown leads 18 men, including five free Blacks, in an attack on the Harper's Ferry ammunition depot, the beginning of guerrilla warfare against slavery - 1859 
image: from Jacob Lawrence's series of paintings about John Brown
Compiled/edited by Union Communication Services

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