-This is micro-historical writing at its best.---Walden Bello, author of Dilemmas of Domination

-Brilliant.---Ken Loach

The stories in this book come to life through the voices of remarkable individuals: child laborers in Dickensian England, visionary women on Parisian barricades, gun-toting railway strikers in America's Wild West, and beer-swilling German metalworkers who tried to stop World War I.

It is a story of urban slums, self-help cooperatives, choirs and brass bands, free love, and self-education by candlelight. And, as the author shows, in the developing...