This Week in People’s History, Feb 18–24, 2026
Dublin’s a Tough Battlefield
FEBRUARY 18 IS THE 105TH ANNIVERSARY of a vivid display of the British Army’s ineffectiveness at suppressing the Irish independence movement during the two-and-a-half-year long Irish War of Independence.
In the morning of that day in 1921, a thousand British troops suddenly surrounded Dublin’s 20-square-block Mountjoy Square neighborhood, and attempted to seal it off from the rest of the city with a cordon of troops, tanks, armored cars, and barbed-wire entanglements. The British announced over truck-mounted loudspeakers that no one would be permitted to enter or leave the area without receiving permission to do so after first being searched at a military checkpoint.
Large squads of heavily-armed British soldiers started to search the area, a densely populated assemblage of multi-unit dwellings. The troops would attempt to seal off a building, using tanks to batter doors down, and ransack it, searching for weapons, revolutionary literature and anything that might be useful to Irish insurgents. They forced the male population to assemble in the street where they were searched and name-checked against a long list of fugitives and suspects.
The Army’s 3-day effort was considerably hampered because, as the military themselves later reported, “Dublin is honeycombed with underground cellars and passages.” If the troops discovered any substantial quantity of military supplies or made significant arrests, they kept the information to themselves. https://www.theirishstory.com/2017/02/16/cowardly-cunning-and-contemptible-the-british-campaign-in-dublin-1919-1921/
¡Karen Silkwood, Presente!
FEBRUARY 19 IS THE 80TH ANNIVERSARY of the birth of Karen Silkwood, hero of the movement for occupational safety and health.
Sadly, Silkwood died in a mysterious 1-car crash in 1974, when she was 28 years old.
She was killed while driving to a meeting with an investigator from her union and with a New York Times reporter, where they planned to discuss the horrible safety conditions at the nuclear fuel plant where Silkwood worked.
There was a great deal of circumstantial evidence that Silkwood's death was no accident, and her employer was eventually forced to pay her estate more than $1 million for negligence, but without having to admit liability.
Silkwood's sacrifice in the struggle for job safety and health is commemorated every year when a rank-and-file worker is presented the Karen Silkwood Award by the New York Committee for Occupational Safety and Health. https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-NeUJQqmXo_Q/VCEOuk7aMSI/AAAAAAABErc/x5Papgmf8cA/s1600/November%2B6,%2B1975,%2BNew%2BYork%2BTimes,%2BConspiracy%2BLaid%2BTo%2BAtom%2BFacility%2BIn%2B$160,000%2BSuit,%2Bby%2BDavid%2BBurnham,.jpeg
Charlie Chaplin’s Anti-Capitalist Masterpiece
FEBRUARY 21 IS THE 90TH ANNIVERSARY of the release of Modern Times, the 1936 cinema masterpiece written, directed, produced and starring Charlie Chaplin.
Modern Times is, as Rotten Tomatoes states, "a slapstick skewering of industrialized America . . . as politically incisive as it is laugh-out-loud hilarious."
If you have never watched it, or cannot recall when you last did, don’t wait–watch it now. You will not be disappointed. https://portside.org/2020-01-26/charlie-chaplin-and-truly-modern-times
Half a Million Dead, and Counting
FEBRUARY 22 IS THE FIFTH ANNIVERSARY of the Covid-19 death toll in the U.S. reaching five hundred thousand, surpassing the combined number of U.S. fatalities in World Wars 1 and 2 and Vietnam.
That day in 2021, which occurred 10 weeks after the first dose of Covid-19 vaccine was administered in the U.S., was also the last day of the pandemic’s deadliest 34 days in the U.S. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/13/us/covid-deaths-elderly-americans.html
A Hard-Won Victory for Farm Workers
FEBRUARY 23 IS THE 40TH ANNIVERSARY of the signing of a novel 3-way contract between the Farm Labor Organizing Committee (FLOC), the Campbell Soup Company and a group of vegetable-producing farmers in Michigan and Ohio. Unlike most labor contracts, which are between an organization of workers and an employer or an employer organization, FLOC negotiated with both employers and with Campbell Soup, which purchases the crops that are produced by the farmworkers on the employers’ farms.
It was necessary to include Campbell Soup as a party to the 1986 contract, because the employers argued they could only increase wages and improve working conditions if the soup company, which was the major consumer of their produce, would agree to pay them higher-than-normal prices.
FLOC had used traditional strikes to bring the employers to the negotiating table. Once FLOC hit upon the strategy of including Campbell Soup in the contract, and then organizing the Campbell Soup Boycott to pressure the company to negotiate, it took two years to reach a deal that was acceptable to all three parties. Under the contract, union members would get higher pay and better working conditions, while the soup company would pay the growers premium prices for crops produced by the labor of FLOC members. https://floc.com/
Colonialism Grows Out of the Barrel of a Gun
FEBRUARY 24 IS THE 200TH ANNIVERSARY of the British victory in the First Anglo-Burmese War, which led, after a brief peace and 60 additional years of war, to the United Kingdom taking control of the territory now known as Myanmar. https://surface.syr.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1022&context=chronos
For more People's History, visit
https://www.facebook.com/jonathan.bennett.7771/