Eugene V. Debs: Socialist for President, Over and Over Again

Labor organizer Eugene V. Debs was born in Terre Haute, Indiana, in 1855. He left home when he was fourteen to work for the railroad—not unusual for the time. In 1875, he helped organize a local lodge of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Fireman, a fraternal benefit society which gradually took on the role of a…

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A Brief History of the Pencil

One of the unexpected things I learned during our visit to Nuremberg over the holidays is that the city was the home to the first mass-produced graphite lead pencils, beginning in 1662. Before we visited Nuremberg, I hadn’t given the history of pencils much thought.* In fact, the only piece of pencil history that I…

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