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“The years with the fruit pickers became a world within the world,” Marian says, “a microcosm of feelings that never left me, not even when I left them. I lived with the pickers, ate, slept, and got drunk with them. I helped bury their men and deliver their babies. We laughed, cried, and talked end…

Between 1929 and 1935 a series of spectacular strikes broke out among laborers in the California farm valleys. As McWilliams wrote: “Never before had farm laborers organized on any such scale and never before had they conducted strikes of such magnitude and such far-reaching social consequence.” In…

Blossom Sheed was born in 1909 in Memphis, Tennessee to a father whose parents had been abolitionists and a mother who came out of democratic agrarian Nebraska. They were literally the salt of the American earth, the kind of people who had fought cheerfully in the Revolution, bravely in the Civil W…

“One day when I was about seventeen I was walking up and down in front of a restaurant in some small town in Montana. I had a sandwich board strapped to my chest and back, advertising the restaurant, and I’d been promised a meal if I walked that beat for six hours. So I’m walking up and down there,…

"[...] I understood everything the socialist had been saying. Everything! I saw it all at once. And all at once, I saw, and I could hardly believe this, there was a way out for me. Now, you gotta understand what this means. I didn’t even know that I was thinking there’s no way out of this life for …