Celebrate People's History!. Группа авторов
color usage in design work.
CPH posters in use at the Young Women’s Leadership Charter School in Chicago.
When giving a talk about the poster series a couple years back, I was approached by a graduate school student in training to become a teacher. It turned out that she was first introduced to the posters when they hung in one of her grade school classrooms, almost a decade earlier. She had encountered them throughout her life, and now she intends to use them in her future classes. I hope that these posters can continue to act as some small corrective to the dominant narratives told in schools, and that more teachers engage students in alternative ways of understanding the past.
To initially fund this project, I saved up money from my day job to pay for printing. Offset printing is relatively inexpensive—about two thousand posters can be printed for six hundred dollars. Over ten years into the project, I’ve been able to sell thousands of posters, so now they more or less pay for themselves. The idea has always been to make the posters inexpensive and accessible to most people: they sell from two to five dollars each, and you can get them online (justseeds.org) or at one of the dozen events, conferences, festivals, and fairs that I attend every year. Today CPH posters to grace the walls of dorm rooms, apartments, community centers, classrooms, and city streets. Over sixty different designs have been printed in the past twelve years, adding up to over 150,000 total posters.
Although I’ve organized and funded these posters myself, they have always been a collective project. Almost one hundred artists have designed posters. Multiple print shops have run the presses they have been printed on.2 Dozens of people have run around at night pasting them on city electrical boxes and construction sites, and thousands have helped distribute them around the world.
Printing CPH posters at Stumptown Printers.
As individual works, these posters pay tribute to each artist, each poster subject, and to the idea of a people’s history. With the posters collected for the first time in this book, we can assess how they function in an entirely new way. It is important, for example, that as a whole they don’t simply speak to individual moments, but to broader sweeps of the past. They attest to the evolution and movement of over five hundred years of struggle for social justice, and yet speak to how much more there is to tell.
History is not simply something that has passed. It is the culmination of all that has come before us—something that is still alive, moving, evolving, and changing. It affects the way we see and interpret the present. I hope this book, and all the posters within it, will reinvigorate our collective desire not only to learn from yesterday, but to keep history alive today.
—Josh MacPhee
May 2010
The Diggers
In 1649, to St. George’s Hill, a ragged band they called the Diggers came to show the people’s will. They defied the landlords, they defied the laws, they were the dispossessed reclaiming what was theirs. We come in peace, they said, to dig and sow, we come to work the land in common, and to make the wasteland grow. This earth divided, we will make whole, so it can be a common treasury for all. The sin of property we do disdain, no one has the right to buy and sell the earth for private gain. We work, we eat together, we need no swords. We will not bow to masters, or pay rent to lords. We are free men, though we are poor. You diggers all stand up for glory, stand up now. From men of property, the orders came. They sent the hired men and troopers to wipe out the Diggers’ claim. Tear down their cottages—destroy their corn. They are dispersed—only the vision lingers on. You poor take courage. You rich take care. The earth is a common treasury for everyone to share.
ARTWORK: ERIK RUIN
The Pueblo Revolt
“One leader perhaps said to another that the man from Oke Owinge has ‘the cunning of the fox and the heart of the bear’ ... according to tradition, it was said that Popé was not arrogant but instead was always willing to learn, consider advice and to explain his decisions.”—Joe Sando, Pueblo Profiles
Po’pay was a Tewa spiritual leader who led the 1680 Pueblo Revolt, an anticolonial movement to remove the Spanish colonial presence in what is now known as the upper Rio Grande Valley. Born with the name Popyn, meaning “ripe squash,” Po’pay was convicted alongside dozens of Indigenous leaders for practicing “sorcery.” Following the public and violent punishment of these “criminals,” the Spanish authorities released the prisoners following the direct action of local communities. Upon his release from jail, Po’pay relocated to Taos, where in 1680 he organized a successful and well-planned assault on the colonial administration in Santa Fe. Carrying knotted deerskins to announce the day of the attack, Pueblo runners informed local communities about a scheduled August 11 uprising. Although commencing a day prematurely, thousands of Indigenous warriors engaged in a ten day offensive that forced the settler community (including Tlaxcala servants, mestizo residents, detribalized Natives known as genízaros, and Pueblo allies) to relocate hundreds of miles south to El Paso del Norte. The anticolonial struggles of Po’pay and his contemporaries remain a specter of the potential and possibility of Indigenous resistance to settler colonialism.
ARTWORK: DYLAN A.T. MINER
Jamaican Maroons Fend Off the British
In the early 1700s, Queen Nanny and the Windward Maroons used guerilla warfare to defeat the British from the mountains of Jamaica. In doing so, they avoided further enslavement and forced the British to capitulate. In 1939-40, the British Governor in Jamaica gave the Maroons two thousand five hundred acres and they were able to live under their own governance.
ARTWORK: DAMON LOCKS
The Stono Rebellion
On Sunday September 9, 1739, a group of Charles Town-area slaves set out toward Spanish-controlled Florida, determined to become free from their white masters in the South Carolina colony. After killing around two dozen people, and burning property, the well-armed group of about one hundred played drums and waved banners in celebration during their hopeful escape south. By chance they were discovered, and a militia of armed churchgoing whites put down what became known as the Stono Rebellion. With about seventy-five deaths, Stono stood as the bloodiest revolt in the English Colonies.
ARTWORK: MARK CORT; TEXT/STENCIL: RUSSELL HOWZE
John Brown (1800-1859)
“It was his [John Brown’s] peculiar doctrine that a man has a perfect right to interfere by force with the slaveholder, in order to rescue the slave. I agree with him. They who are continually shocked by slavery have some right to be shocked by the violent death of the slaveholder, but such will be more shocked by his life than by his death. I shall not be forward to think him mistaken in his method who quickest succeeds to liberate the slave.”—Henry David Thoreau
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