Back in 2014 I wrote about a film called Palikari — Louis Tikas and the Ludlow Massacre. Directed by Nikos Ventouras and produced by Lamprini Thoma, the film tells the story of Greek and other immigrant miners during the Colorado Coal Strike of 1913-1914. The other day, our friend Michael…
Bloodpot and Melting Pot: Woody Guthrie and “Old Man Trump”
In 1950, Woody Guthrie leased an apartment from Donald Trump’s father, Fred, in the Beach Haven complex, near Brighton Beach in Brooklyn. As Woody’s biographer Will Kaufman writes in an article published today on The Conversation, it didn’t take too long before Woody “was already lamenting the bigotry that pervaded his new, lily-white…
Moses Called The First Strike
People from all parts of Europe made their way to Calumet at the end of the nineteenth and the start of the twentieth centuries. The copper-mining town attracted so many immigrants — Germans, Italians, Croatians, Slovenians, Cornish, Irish, Swedes, Norwegians — that it’s sometimes jokingly referred to as “the smelting…