For a Better World
The Winnipeg General Strike and the Workers' Revolt
- 408 pages
- English
- PDF
- Available on iOS & Android
For a Better World
The Winnipeg General Strike and the Workers' Revolt
About This Book
Canada's largest and most famous example of class conflict, the Winnipeg General Strike, redefined local, national, and international conversations around class, politics, region, ethnicity, and gender. The Strike's centenary occasioned a re-examination of this critical moment in working-class history, when 300 social justice activists, organizers, scholars, trade unionists, artists, and labour rights advocates gathered in Winnipeg in 2019.
Probing the meaning of the General Strike in new and innovative ways, For a Better World includes a selection of contributions from the conference as well as others' explorations of the character of class confrontation in the aftermath of the First World War. Editors Naylor, Hinther, and Mochoruk depict key events of 1919, detailing the dynamic and complex historiography of the Strike and the larger Workers' Revolt that reverberated around the world and shaped the century following the war. The chapters delve into intersections of race, class, and gender. Settler colonialism's impact on the conflict is also examined. Placing the struggle in Winnipeg within a broader national and international context, several contributors explore parallel strikes in Edmonton, Crowsnest Pass, Montreal, Kansas City, and Seattle.
For a Better World interrogates types of commemoration and remembrance, current legacies of the Strike, and its ongoing influence. Together, the essays in this collection demonstrate that the Winnipeg General Strike continues to mobilizeârevealing our radical past and helping us to think imaginatively about collective action in the future.
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Table of contents
- Cover
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Chapter 1. âStrike or Revolutionâ Redux: The Historiography of the Winnipeg General Strike
- Chapter 2. In the Water: Race, Empire, and the Winnipeg General Strike
- Chapter 3. From Patriotism to Insurgency: The Shifting Allegiances of Winnipeg 1919âs Striker-Soldiers
- Chapter 4. âAdapt to the Institutions and Manners of this Countryâ: Winnipeg Jews and the General Strike
- Chapter 5. The Edmonton General Strike
- Chapter 6. The Winnipeg General Strike in the Crowsnest Pass
- Chapter 7. Montrealâs Civil War: The Municipal Workersâ Strike of 1918
- Chapter 8. âJustice and Not Charity Should Be Your Demand!â: Montrealâs Unemployed and the Workersâ Revolt
- Chapter 9. The Kansas City General Strike: Wartime Solidarity in the American Midwest
- Chapter 10. The Seattle General Strike: Five Days That Matter
- Chapter 11. The Storm before the Calm: Social and Political Upheaval in the Western Hemisphere
- Chapter 12. The âRural Nothing Worth Monkey Police,â or the Winnipeg Origins of 100 Years of Canadian State Spying on Labour and the Left
- Chapter 13. Not by Repression Alone: Defeating the Workersâ Revolt by False Promises of Reform
- Chapter 14. Remembering 1919: Commemoration and the Winnipeg General Strike
- Chapter 15. Putting History to Work: Public History and Commemoration
- Chapter 16. The Winnipeg General Strike in the Twenty-First Century
- Contributors
- Index