A blog carnival is a collection of blog posts on a given subject. This month's history blog carnival is up and full of interesting links worth clicking.
Off topic. I like your blog. I found through a link from... Hell, I forget. Anyhow, I'm a bit of a radical bay area historian myself. My credentials are similar to yours. Ha! I got started on it years ago. When I was a teenager in the early '70's. I was told to escort an old lady home from a meeting. We rode the bus through Oakland to her apartment. It turns out that she was an old Wobbly, a founding member of the Communist Party who split with Trotsky and the left opposition. She had lived and been active in Oakland her whole life. As our bus rolled through town, she pointed out spots where some long forgotten event had occurred. It seemed like there was something historical about every block in Oakland. Man, I wish I could remember ten percent of what she told me. Anyhow, it put me on to the idea that history takes place all around us, and that the past is still alive. I've been interested ever since. I'll be subscribing to your blog and looking forward to future posts. By the way, I now live in Santa Rosa. Radical history in this town is sort of bleak. It seems that SRO was a hotbed of ex confederate officers who were hoping to keep the confederate tradition alive in the west. Petaluma, by comparison was a rural resting place for old communists and Jewish leftists. Sebastopol was a hippie town before there were hippies. It was home to a large and fairly successful anarchist commune back in the 1920's. I think I've got that right.
Thanks so much for commenting Jon. I had heard a little about Petaluma as the OG home of the Jewish, Communist chicken farmers - didn't know anything about Santa Rosa though. I'll have to read up now!
2 comments:
Off topic. I like your blog. I found through a link from... Hell, I forget. Anyhow, I'm a bit of a radical bay area historian myself. My credentials are similar to yours. Ha!
I got started on it years ago. When I was a teenager in the early '70's. I was told to escort an old lady home from a meeting. We rode the bus through Oakland to her apartment. It turns out that she was an old Wobbly, a founding member of the Communist Party who split with Trotsky and the left opposition. She had lived and been active in Oakland her whole life. As our bus rolled through town, she pointed out spots where some long forgotten event had occurred. It seemed like there was something historical about every block in Oakland. Man, I wish I could remember ten percent of what she told me. Anyhow, it put me on to the idea that history takes place all around us, and that the past is still alive. I've been interested ever since. I'll be subscribing to your blog and looking forward to future posts.
By the way, I now live in Santa Rosa. Radical history in this town is sort of bleak. It seems that SRO was a hotbed of ex confederate officers who were hoping to keep the confederate tradition alive in the west. Petaluma, by comparison was a rural resting place for old communists and Jewish leftists. Sebastopol was a hippie town before there were hippies. It was home to a large and fairly successful anarchist commune back in the 1920's. I think I've got that right.
Thanks so much for commenting Jon. I had heard a little about Petaluma as the OG home of the Jewish, Communist chicken farmers - didn't know anything about Santa Rosa though. I'll have to read up now!
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