Live coverage from the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, featuring a panel with SUNY Fredonia alumnus Scott Martelle, '84, author of Blood Passion, will be aired on Book TV Saturday, April 26, at 2 p.m., Pacific Daylight Time (5 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time).
Martelle is on a panel titled, "A History of Violence." Book TV will also be doing interviews and call-ins with authors attending the festival.
Published by Rutgers University Press, Martelle's book, Blood Passion: The Ludlow Massacre and Class War in the American West, describes the history of the Ludlow Massacre of April 1914 in which striking miners and their union supporters fought local militiamen across 200 miles of Southern Colorado. The battle did not end until President Woodrow Wilson sent in the U.S. Army.
Martelle is a staff writer for the Los Angeles Times. He studied political science at SUNY Fredonia.
From the Rutgers University Press website:
"Martelle's excellent book captures [the Ludlow Massacre] with a journalist's flair for narrative and a historian's penchant for making the necessary inferences where they belong: on the page for all to see." -San Francisco Chronicle
"Martelle juggles the myriad characters and the conflicting accounts with flowing prose and a straightforward approach...Blood Passion is a necessary, nuanced examination of an era of unprecedented domestic turbulence that eventually sparked dramatic changes in relations between labor and management." -LA Times
"Blood Passion is the definitive account of a major landmark in the American struggle for social justice. And the way Scott Martelle tells the story is splendid proof that history can both be written as vividly as a novel and also be documented with scrupulous care." - Adam Hochschild, author of Bury the Chains and King Leopold's Ghost
"We must welcome this carefully-researched study of one of the most dramatic, violent, and important episodes in the history of labor struggles in this country." - Howard Zinn
