Historian and author of Stop, Thief!, The Incomplete, True, Authentic, and Wonderful History of May Day Peter Linebaugh gives a lecture in honor of May Day, which began in America. From the May pole dance with indigenous folk at Merry Mount, Massachusetts, in 1627, to Chicago's police riot in 1886 at Haymarket Square against advocates of the eight-hour day, May Day has given us both green and red themes to celebrate. Suppose we paused to think of each of these stories as history's seeds that have yet to reach their maturity. Conquest and settlement were accomplished with means of mechanization. In May Day, whether as a story of Puritanical expropriation from earthly subsistence or as a story of gilded age exploitation of immigrant wage-slaves, we may easily find contemporary themes related to the extractions and extinctions of our own time. May Day celebrates the green and red struggle of workers across the planet who cry for health and wealth, common wealth.
 

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Peter Linebaugh was born in Washington, D.C. in 1942, the year the Nazis launched the V-2 rocket. He became an anti-fascist, and grew up in London, Cattaraugus, Muskogee, Karachi, and New York. He became a historian under the eloquent peacenik and labor historian, E.P. Thompson. He has written books such as The London Hanged: Crime and Civil Society in the Eighteenth Century, The Magna Carta Manifesto: Liberties and Commons for All. Berkeley, and Red Hot Globe Round Burning: A Tale at the Crossroads of Commons and Closure, of Love and Terror, of Race and Class, and of Kate and Ned Despard.