Rebecca Riots! True Tales of Transvestite Terrorists Who Vexed Victoria

Just in time for your last-minute tax filing day gift needs, announcing the republication of Henry Tobit Evans’s formerly out-of-print story of the Rebecca Riots.

You can read the entire book on-line here at The Picket Line, but those of you who don’t much go in for reading whole books in the form of web pages (and I can’t say I blame you) will appreciate the paperback format.

The book has some additional advantages, too. Most notably, it has both a general index and an index of people. In the text, Welsh people and places are given in a variety of spellings (and sometimes in both Welsh and Anglicized versions), which makes computer-aided searches difficult. The index of the new printed edition consolidates these various spellings.

The book also has a pair of appendices that were not included in the original, 100-year-old edition (these too are indexed). I took the liberty of changing the title from the original, rather dry, Rebecca and Her Daughters: Being a History of the Agrarian Disturbances in Wales Known as “The Rebecca Riots” to the new, gleefully lurid, Rebecca Riots! True Tales of the Transvestite Terrorists who Vexed Victoria.

They tore down the tollbooths, freed the poor from the poorhouse, reopened the commons to all, made deadbeat dads pay up, kept Queen Victoria’s cops at bay, wore women’s clothing, and called themselves Rebecca!

It weighs in at 240 pages and will run you $12.99 plus shipping. Thanks to Kenny Cole for the art that I incorporated into the cover design, which he made available under a Creative Commons license.


Don’t look now, but the war tax resisters are coming.

Neither the war tax resisters nor the TEA Party crowd seem to be getting much press yet this year. It may be that after last year’s big and novel TEA Party protests, it’s going to take a lot more to get the press interested this year.

Even more so than last year, the TEA Parties seem to have been absorbed by the Republican party, which has raised the hackles of some marginalized anti-war conservatives and libertarians. One started a Facebook group called “Taxed Enough Already? End the Wars! and hopes to bring the anti-war small-government contingent out in force to this year’s Parties.