The Incomplete, True, Authentic, and Wonderful History of May Day

An essential compendium of reflections on the reviled, glorious, and voltaic occasion of May 1st, the international May Day holiday
 
May 1st is a day that once made the rich and powerful cower in fear and caused Parliament to ban the Maypole—a magnificent and riotous day of rebirth, renewal, and refusal. This book’s reflections on the Red and the Green—out of which arguably the only hope for the future lies—are populated by the likes of Native American anarchocommunist Lucy Parsons, the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement, Karl Marx, José Martí, W. E. B. Du Bois, Rosa Luxemburg, SNCC, and countless others, both sentient and verdant. The book is a forceful reminder of the potentialities of the future, for the coming of a time when the powerful will fall, the commons restored, and a better world born anew.

Peter Linebaugh is a historian and a professor at the University of Toledo. He is the author of The London Hanged, The Magna Carta Manifesto, and Stop, Thief!, and the coauthor of Albion’s Fatal Tree and The Many Headed Hydra. His articles have appeared in publications that include CounterPunch, the New Left Review, New York University Law Review, Radical History Review, and Social History. He lives in Toledo, Ohio.