Farmworkers set fire to a barn housing a combine harvester that threatened to undermine their livelihood harvesting grain in the Livermore Valley. - 1869

Emma Goldman, women's rights activist and radical, born in Lithuania. She came to the U.S. at age 17 - 1869

Thanks to an army of thousands of Chinese and Irish immigrants, who laid 2,000 miles of track, the nation’s first transcontinental railway line was finished by the joining of the Union Pacific and Central Pacific lines at Promontory Point, Utah – 1869

Big Bill Haywood born in Salt Lake City, Utah: Leader of Western Federation of Miners, Wobblies (IWW) founder - 1869

The Workingman's Advocate of Chicago publishes the first installment of The Other Side, by Martin A. Foran, president of the Coopers' International Union. Believed to be the first novel by a trade union leader and some say the first working-class novel ever published in the U.S. - 1868

At a New York convention of the National Labor Congress, Susan B. Anthony calls for the formation of a Working Women's Association. As a delegate to the Congress, she persuaded the committee on female labor to call for votes for women and equal pay for equal work. But male delegates deleted the reference to the vote - 1868

San Francisco brewery workers begin a 9 month strike as local employers follow the union-busting lead of the National Brewer’s Assn. and fire their unionized workers, replacing them with scabs. Two unionized brewers refused to go along, kept producing beer, prospered wildly and induced the Association to capitulate. A contract benefit since having unionized two years earlier, certainly worth defending: free beer - 1868

W.E.B. DuBois, educator and civil rights activist, born - 1868

A California state law was enacted providing the 8 hour day for most workers, but it was not effectively enforced - 1868

The San Francisco Board of Supervisors passes an ordinance setting an eight-hour workday for all city employees - 1867

The Pacific Mail Steamship Co. fires all employees who had been working an eight hour day, then joins with other owners to form the "Ten-Hour League Society" for the purpose of uniting all mechanics "willing to work at the old rates, neither unjust to the laborers nor ruinous to the capital and enterprise of the city and state." The effort failed - 1867

The Knights of St. Crispin union is formed at a secret meeting in Milwaukee. It grew to 50,000 members before being crushed by employers later that year - 1867