Bread and Roses

The 1912 textile strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts was a watershed moment in labor history as significant as the Haymarket bombing in Chicago and the Triangle fire in New York. In a history with the narrative drive of a novel, journalist Watson provides the first full-length account of the strike that began when textile workers stormed out of the mills on a frigid January day. Despite owners' predictions to the contrary, the walkout soon became a protracted Dickensian drama that included 23,000 strikers from fifty-one nations singing as they paraded through Lawrence, bayonet-toting militiamen…