Mention the term “Luddite” to most folks nowadays, and it’ll conjure up images of John McCain types – elderly folks still mystified by the electric typewriter, with “12:00” blinking perpetually on their VCRs – or the hard-core back-to-the-Earth sorts, who bristle at any device with moving parts. As usual, the actual history is far more complex: these “frame-breakers” of early 19th-century England were not a variant on Amish farmers given over to vandalism, but rather the product of a complicated confluence of occurrences involving everything from newfangled labor-saving machines to the Napoleonic Wars.
Join me, if you will, in the Cave of the Moonbat, where tonight we’ll take a look inside the changing marketplace at the dawn of the 1800s – and at a group of folks who tried to plow the sea by attempting to arrest the flow of history.