WINNIPEG, Manitoba — Why should we care today about a general strike in a faraway city on the remote Canadian plains exactly a century ago? Why should the fact that it lasted six weeks and involved 36,000 strikers — or even that it produced at least four novels — interrupt our preoccupations with American travails: a presidential impeachment, a race for the White House or even our absorption in this week's NFL schedule?
That is a long story, rooted in the world of 1919, a story abbreviated here but with lessons for our own time, our own leaders, our own country.
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