America's Forgotten Holiday: May Day and Nationalism, 1867-1960

Though now a largely forgotten holiday in the United States, May Day was founded here in 1886 by an energized labor movement as a part of its struggle for the eight-hour day. In ensuing years, May Day took on new meaning, and by the early 1900s had become an annual rallying point for anarchists, socialists, and communists around the world. Yet American workers and radicals also used May Day to advance alternative definitions of what it meant to be an American and what America should be as a nation.
Mining contemporary newspapers, party and union records, oral histories, photographs, and rare film footage, America's Forgotten Holiday explains how May Days celebrants, through their colorful parades and mass meetings, both contributed to the construction of their own radical American identities and publicized alternative social and political models for the nation.
This fascinating story of May Day in America reveals how many contours of American nationalism developed in dialogue with political radicals and workers, and uncovers the cultural history of those who considered themselves both patriotic and dissenting Americans.

Author: Donna T. Haverty-Stacke
Publisher: New York University Press
Published: 12/01/2008
Pages: 314
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.30lbs
Size: 9.10h x 6.10w x 1.00d
ISBN: 9780814737057

Review Citation(s):
Chronicle of Higher Education 02/20/2009 pg. 20
Choice 06/01/2009

About the Author
Donna T. Haverty-Stacke is Professor of History at Hunter College and the Graduate Center, CUNY, where she teaches courses in U.S. cultural, urban, labor and legal history. Haverty-Stacke is the author of America's Forgotten Holiday: May Day and Nationalism, 1867 - 1960 (NYU Press, 2009) and Trotskyists on Trial: Free Speech and Political Persecution since the Age of FDR (NYU Press, 2015) and co-editor with Daniel J. Walkowitz of Rethinking U.S. Labor History: Essays on the Working-Class Experience, 1756 - 2009 (Continuum, 2010).