To mark a century and a half since the Paris Commune, a seventy-two-day-long uprising begun in the spring of 1871 that shook the world and inspired generations of activists around the globe, join J. Michelle Coghlan for a conversation on the Commune’s profound and lasting impacts upon our neighborhoods, where the reverberations were deep and palpable. Refugees from the Commune called the Village home and shaped social and political movements in the neighborhood. Justus Schwab’s radical saloon on East First Street was a center for those who fled and those who were inspired by the Commune. For decades’the anniversary of this defining event was marked in our neighborhoods by marches and lavish annual festivals. Local radicals from Victoria Woodhull to Emma Goldman, and many more, took up the mantle of radical change and possibility this revolutionary event suggested.

J. Michelle Coghlan is Senior Lecturer in American Literature at the University of Manchester (UK), where she teaches courses on US radical memory, food studies, and the literary life of the senses. She is the author of Sensational Internationalism: the Paris Commune and the Remapping of American Memory in the Long Nineteenth Century, which was awarded the 2017 Arthur Miller Centre First Book Prize in American Studies, and recently edited The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Food.