The Incomplete, True, Authentic, And Wonderful History Of May Day

(Paperback)

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'May Day is about affirmation, the love of life, and the start of spring, so it has to be about the beginning of the end of the capitalist system of exploitation, oppression, war, and overall misery, toil, and moil.' So writes celebrated historian Peter Linebaugh in an essential compendium of reflections on the reviled, glorious and voltaic occasion of the first of May. The Incomplete, True, Authentic, and Wonderful History of May Day is a forceful reminder of the potentialities of the future, for the coming of a time when the powerful will fall and the commons restored.

Reviews

"There is not a more important historian living today. Period."
--Robin D.G. Kelley, author of 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 of 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 of Storming the Gates of Paradise

Author Bio

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.