About

The 1919 Review is a blog on history and culture. Right here on my Home Page you can browse the full archive on a wide range of topics.

You can contact me at maxwellmurder.l@gmail.com.

All posts are by me, with the exception of a few guest posts – in those cases the author is named in the post itself.

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Why 1919?

My interests are wide-ranging but they often circle back around to the vicinity of the year 1919 – the year of the Limerick Soviet and the Belfast Engineering strike; a year during which large parts of Europe were liberated by revolutionary councils of workers, and many colonies of the European powers rose up in revolt. Revolution Under Siege also centres around that year.

But in the end, it’s just a name. Socialism, class struggle and revolution fascinate me, but my interests are wide-ranging. I also write about books, comics, movies and videogames, Ireland, the Middle Ages, the 20th and 21st centuries, and the literature of made-up worlds and imagined futures. I tend to deal with the extremely trivial and the extremely serious – with not much in between.

The title also refers to Nineteen Nineteen by John Dos Passos, a brilliant novel in his USA Trilogy. See the extract below. It’s not my favourite book (or even my favourite book named after a year – that award goes to 2666 by Roberto Bolaño). But it is a classic and it neatly joins together the historical and cultural aspects of this blog.

Credits:

Images are generally from Wikimedia Commons – if I use other sources, I’ll usually specify.

The logo uses a rust-red texture I got from Lucas Carl over on Unsplash, and a newspaper texture from a facsimile of the trade union paper Voice Of Labour which came with The Revolution Papers.

‘All the way down to Paris on the train, Ed kept making him drink and talking about the revolution, saying he had it on good authority the syndicates were going to seize the factories in Italy on the first of May. Hungary had gone red and Bavaria, next it would be Austria, then Italy, then Prussia and France; the American troops sent against the Russians in Archangel had mutinied: ‘It’s the world revolution, a goddam swell time to be alive, and we’ll be goddam lucky if we come out of it with whole skins.’

‘‘Dick said grumpily that he didn’t think so; the Allies had things well in hand.

‘‘But, Dick, I thought you were all for the revolution, it’s the only way to end this cockeyed war.’

‘‘The war’s over now and all these revolutions are just the war turned inside out… You can’t stop war by shooting all your opponents. That’s just more war.’

‘They got sore and argued savagely.’

  • John Dos Passos, Nineteen Nineteen, 446-447