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Zinn Education Project

Shortly after Woodrow Wilson took office there began in Colorado one of the most bitter and violent struggles between workers and corporate capital in the history of the country.

This was the Colorado coal strike that began in September 1913 and culminated in the “Ludlow Massacre” of April 1914. Eleven thousand miners in southern Colorado … worked for the Colorado Fuel & Iron Corporation, which was owned by the Rockefeller family. Aroused by the murder of one of their organizers, they went on strike against low pay, dangerous conditions, and feudal domination of their lives in towns completely controlled by the mining companies. …   Continue reading “Ludlow Massacre: April 20, 1914”

USA Today

In his 1968 song Mama Tried, Merle Haggard sang of turning 21 in prison. Haggard, who died Wednesday in California at age 79, had done just that, though not, as he sang in the song, “doing life without parole.”

Haggard’s youth of petty crime, financial insecurity and freight-car hopping eventually informed songs that spoke plainly but not predictably of social outcasts, blue-collar concerns and persistent restlessness.   Continue reading “Merle Haggard dead at 79”