For a Better World: The Winnipeg General Strike and the Workers' Revolt

Witness to Yesterday (The Champlain Society Podcast on Canadian History)

In this podcast episode, Nicole O’Byrne talks to James Naylor, Rhonda L. Hinther, and Jim Mochoruk about their book, For a Better World: The Winnipeg General Strike and the Workers' Revolt, published by UMP in September 2022. Canada’s largest and most famous example of class conflict, the Winnipeg General Strike, redefined local, national, and international conversations around class, politics, region, ethnicity, and gender. The Strike’s centenary occasioned a re-examination of this critical moment in working-class history, when 300 social justice activists, organizers, scholars, trade unionists, artists, and labour rights advocates gathered in Winnipeg in 2019. Editors Naylor, Hinther, and Mochoruk depict key events of 1919, detailing the dynamic and complex historiography of the Strike and the larger Workers’ Revolt that reverberated around the world and shaped the century following the war. For a Better World interrogates types of commemoration and remembrance, current legacies of the Strike, and its ongoing influence. Together, the essays in this collection demonstrate that the Winnipeg General Strike continues to mobilize—revealing our radical past and helping us to think imaginatively about collective action in the future. James Naylor is the author of The Fate of Labour Socialism: The Co-operative Commonwealth Federation and the Dream of a Working-Class Future (2016). He is a professor of history at Brandon University. Rhonda L. Hinther is a professor in the Department of History at Brandon University, and an active public historian. Prior to joining BU, she served as Director of Research and Curation at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights and, before that, as Curator of Western Canadian History at the Canadian Museum of History. She is the co-editor of Civilian Internment in Canada: Histories and Legacies. Jim Mochoruk has taught at the University of North Dakota since 1993. His books include Formidable Heritage: Manitoba’s North and the Cost of Development, 1870 to 1930. Image Credit: UMP If you like our work, please consider supporting it: bit.ly/support_WTY. Your support contributes to the Champlain Society’s mission of opening new windows to directly explore and experience Canada’s past.