Review:
Eric Hobsbawm, the eminent English labor historian, is concerned here with "the sort of people whose names are usually unknown to anyone outside their family and neighbors"--the machinists, grocers, bus conductors, and bartenders who make many small worlds go around. In a series of essays, he looks into the role of shoemakers in European politics (cobblers being a particularly left-leaning lot), the influence of Luddite machine breakers on the labor movement, the abortive union of students and trade unionists in the May 1968 uprising in France, and jazz music, which he considers to be an idiom of the laboring class. These unknown people, in Hobsbawm's view, have made uncommon contributions to their times and are too little honored, even by the international celebration called May Day, the origins of which he traces in an especially fine essay. --Gregory MacNamee
About the Author:
Eric Hobsbawm was born in Alexandria in 1917 and educated in Austria, Germany and England. He taught at Birkbeck College, University of London, and then at the New School for Social Research in New York. In addition to The Age of Revolution, The Age of Capital, The Age of Empire and The Age of Extremes, his books include Bandits, Revolutionaries, Uncommon People, and his memoir Interesting Times. Eric Hobsbawm died in 2012.
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