Steven Parfitt's "Knights Across the Atlantic," the movie

Featured at My Book, The Movie: Knights Across the Atlantic: The Knights of Labor in Britain and Ireland by Steven Parfitt.

The entry begins:

It pains me to say it, but the British and Irish Knights of Labor are not likely to get their own movie anytime soon. The problem is not finding interesting characters. Hadyn Sanders, for instance, became the first socialist town councillor in Britain, was often removed from his own meetings by the police, and referred to his fellow councillors as “bald-headed and pot-bellied… more fond of guzzling than justice.” The problem is that the British and Irish Knights were the offshoot of a much larger American organisation, and only lasted for ten years. They never led strikes and political campaigns on anything like the scale of their American brothers and sisters. Without those kinds of dramatic events our movie would have to take a lot of liberties with the historical record.

But the British and Irish Knights were also associated with one of the great upheavals in British labour and political history, the...[read on]

Learn more about Knights Across the Atlantic at the Liverpool University Press website.

My Book, The Movie: Knights Across the Atlantic.

--Marshal Zeringue