Personally, I hate the This-Day-in-History genre. Far too often it is some Great-Man-History trope, representing a rather archaic way of thinking about history. However, I love the social media accounts of Working Class History. For the past few years, this anonymous collective have been using FaceBook, Twitter, and Instagram to tell the stories of strikes, anti-fascist resistance, and profiles of people who tried to create a better world. One of the things I love about the project is that it is not narrowly “class based”, in that World Class History engages feminism, LBGTQ+ liberation, and a range of liberation movements. If many of the vignettes are tragic as there are far too many martyrs for social justice, they are always inspirational. Working Class History reminds us that we are not alone in our diverse struggles against the hegemonic power of capital and the forces of reaction.
Today I’m speaking with John of Working Class History, a member of this collective of activists. While none of the group are professional historians, they have published a book: Working Class History: Everyday Acts of Resistance and Rebellion with a forward by Noam Chomsky, published by PM Press in 2020. You can follow the work of this anonymous collective on all the major social media platforms.
Michael G. Vann is a professor of world history at California State University, Sacramento. A specialist in imperialism and the Cold War in Southeast Asia, he is the author of The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt: Empires, Disease, and Modernity in French Colonial Vietnam (Oxford University Press, 2018). When he’s not reading or talking about new books with smart people, Mike can be found surfing in Santa Cruz, California.
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