A Great Double Feature

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…

Read more

Joe Hill’s music in Chicago this week

If you’re in Chicago, don’t miss Bucky Halker at the Filament Theatre this Wednesday, November 18th at 7:30PM, performing songs from his new CD Anywhere But Utah: Songs of Joe Hill.  Bucky will share the stage with special guests the BS Brass Band and John Abbey. More information here, at Bucky’s site and…

Read more

Quick Holiday Round Up — 1913 in 2013

There was a ceremony in Calumet this past Tuesday to mark the 100th anniversary of the Italian Hall disaster, and all around the country there were news articles, blog posts, TV shows and radio programs about the trouble in Calumet on Christmas Eve, 1913. Our film came in for some…

Read more

“They Try to Create Despair Among the Miners”

One of the small treasures I brought back to New York from Lake Superior is Hannu Leppanen and Daniel Schneider’s 2013 letterpress edition of Tyomies, the Finnish workingman’s newspaper published during the strike of 1913. I’ve mentioned the project here before. Daniel set up his Chandler & Price Pilot Press…

Read more

Murder, Mother Jones and the Militia

By August of 1913, things in the Copper Country were really starting to heat up. The miners had been on strike since the end of July, and the strike was “gradually drifting,” in the words of the Calumet News, “towards its second stage, a period of guerilla warfare.” The Michigan National…

Read more

STRIKE!

100 years ago today, the Finnish language newspaper Työmies or The Worker announced: This morning in Michigan’s Copper region, a miner’s strike broke out which, according to information received from various locations up to this point, has stopped work in all of the mines with few exceptions. The strike that began…

Read more

For International Women’s Day – A Sketch from the Cutting Room Floor

This is an early sketch of a scene in 1913 Massacre that ended up on the cutting room floor. It features some excerpts from an interview with Helen Winter. At the time we interviewed her, Helen was in her 90s and, as she herself told us, she felt her life…

Read more

Talking 1913 Massacre at the New School for Social Research Doc Studies

Here’s the video of a Q & A we did back in September at the New School for Social Research about the making of 1913 Massacre. We both loved being back in the classroom and hope to do lots more of this in 2013. Ken Ross and Louis V. Galdieri…

Read more