Road Trip Through History: The Mother Jones Monument

Driving from Chicago to the Missouri Ozarks and back over the last mumble years,(1) I have passed the sign for the Mother Jones monument many, many times. It is a plain, almost amateurish, sign, without the official imprimatur(2) of a brown tourist attraction sign(3) or the flash of billboard advertising a show in Branson. Nothing…

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From the Archives: Samuel Gompers and the American Federation of Labor

Yesterday I was walking home from the library with a bag of research books, considering how to spend the long Labor Day weekend.  I am working on building the habit of taking Sundays off.  (Radical, I know.) And I was musing over whether I could stretch my developing time-off-muscles to include Labor Day.  After all,…

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