1860s

"B. I. Nicolaevsky was Curator of the Menshevik collection at the Hoover Institution. An active member of the Russian Social Democratic Party, he became Director of the Moscow Marx-Engels Institute after the revolution of 1917. Deported from Russia in 1922, he later became Director of the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam."

Originally published in "The Revolutionary Internationals, 1864-1943"; ed. Milorad M. Drachovitch, Stanford University Press, 1966.

It was the shoemakers of Lynn, Massachusetts, a factory town north east of Boston, who started the largest strike to take place in the United States before the Civil War. Lynn had pioneered in the use of sewing machines in factories, replacing shoemaker artisans. The factory workers in Lynn, who began to organise in the l830s, later started a militant newspaper, the Awl.

A sheriff in the Hudson River Valley near Albany, New York, about to go into the hills in the fall of 1839 to collect back rents from tenants on the enormous Rensselaer estate, was handed a letter:

... the tenants have organized themselves into a body, and resolved not to pay any more rent until