British socialist and author Mike Marqusee pays tribute to one of history’s great revolutionaries on the anniversary of his death 200 years ago.
Socialist Worker, June 11, 2009
Thomas Paine (Auguste Millière)
“THIS INTERMENT was a scene to affect and to wound any sensible heart. Contemplating who it was, what man it was, that we were committing to an obscure grave on an open and disregarded bit of land, I could not help but feel most acutely.”
The occasion for this lament was the sparsely attended funeral of Thomas Paine, who died 200 years ago in June 1809, at the age of 72, and was buried in the small farm he owned in what was then the rural hamlet of New Rochelle, 20 miles north of New York City.
Not long before, New Rochelle’s bigwigs had barred Paine from voting, claiming he was not a U.S. citizen. Paine, who had virtually invented the idea of U.S. citizenship, was furious.
But this was not the end of his indignities. When he sought a place to be buried, even the Quakers would not oblige him. Hence, the muted funeral of the man who had inspired and guided revolutions in North America and France–and equally important, the revolution that did not happen in Britain.
Peace and Justice Post 
Obituary: John Saville
June 16, 2009Marxist historian renowned for his great work, the Dictionary of Labour Biography
John Saville, the socialist economic and social historian who has died aged 93, was an academic at Hull University for nearly 40 years, but will be remembered above all for the great, open-ended Dictionary of Labour Biography (partly co-edited with Joyce Bellamy), of which he was able to complete the first 10 volumes (1972-2000), and the three volumes of Essays in Labour History (1960, 1971, 1977) co-edited with Asa Briggs (Lord Briggs).
He was born John Stamatopoulos, in a Lincolnshire village near Gainsborough, to Edith Vessey, from a local working-class family, and Orestes Stamatopoulos, a Greek engineer who disappeared from the lives of both soon after. His mother’s remarriage in London some years after the first world war to a widowed tailor, freemason and reader of the Daily Mail, to whom she had acted as housekeeper, gave her son a comfortable lower-middle-class childhood and the name he later adopted.
Continued >>
Share this:
Tags:books, Eric Hobsbawm, Hull University, India, John Saville, social historian
Posted in Commentary | Leave a Comment »