Man examines pit beneath where a tent had stood on its platform (1914)
April 6, 2009
John Lawson, Mother Jones, Horace Hawkins (1914?)
The Symposium
Since news of southern Colorado Coal strikes first made national headlines in the early twentieth century, writers have put accounts, stories, interpretations, and memories into writing in the press, in photographs, in poetry, in monographs. Writers have called the Ludlow Massacre of April 20, 1914, which effectively ended the southern Colorado Coal war, the bloodiest labor conflict in American history. What it meant to immigrant laborers, to corporate barons, soldiers and ordinary businesspeople has been of grave importance to the nation, though for a time it seemed the events and their implications would go forgotten. Recently, the Ludlow Massacre has engendered a series of books—academic, journalistic, poetic, fictional—that are bringing events and the arguments about them back into light. This symposium on Ludlow will raise questions about what actually happened on that day (and before and after), how we know, how we tell the tale. In panel discussions and workshops the symposium will ask us to deal with narrations of events, problems in teaching histories, and writing about Ludlow.
Who Should Attend
Secondary-school teachers and educators from El Paso, Teller, Huerfano, and Douglass counties, university professors, amateur and professional historians, United Mine Workers of America union members and leaders, archeologists, creative writers, students and all other interested parties.
Speakers Include
• Thomas Andrews—Assistant Professor of History, University of Colorado Denver. Author of Killing for Coal: America’s Deadliest Labor War (2008)
• Anne Hyde—Professor of History and Director of Hulbert Center for Southwest Studies, Colorado College.
• Scott Martelle—Journalist. Author of Blood Passion: The Ludlow Massacre and Class War in the American West (2008)
• David Mason—Professor of English, Colorado College. Author of Ludlow, a verse novel (2007)
• Maria Montoya—Associate Professor of History, New York University. Author of Translating Property: The Maxwell Land Grant and the Conflict over Land in the American West, 1840–1940 (2002). At work on a book on the Colorado Fuel & Iron, Co..
• Zeese Papanikolas—Writer. Author of Buried Unsung: Louis Tikas and the Ludlow Massacre (1991)
Contact + Registration
You may register on the day of the symposium.
There is NO fee to attend Thursday and Friday. The Saturday bus tour to Ludlow costs $10. A box lunch is available for $6.50.
Please support our authors by purchasing their publications.
For further information contact Jaimie Stevenson at tel.719.389.6317 or jstevenson@coloradocollege.edu
The Ludlow Symposium