Around the world, really, nearly everywhere.

But the U.S., May the 1st is a big deal.

International Workers' Day or May Day, or as it's known here, last Tuesday, was observed

in Moscow's Red Square with an orderly parade.

In the Philippines, protesters burned President Rodrigo de Terté in effigy,

while in Paris, over 200 were arrested when anarchists crashed May Day rallies there.

On our shores, it was decidedly more quiet,

although thousands did march in Puerto Rico to protest austerity measures

before altercations with police.

But really, you'd think the U.S. had very little to do with May Day.

In fact, we created it.

Donna Haverty-Stack is a professor of history at Hunter College at the City University of New York.

She's also the author of America's Forgotten Holiday, May Day and Nationalism, 1867 to 1960.

For our purposes, we'll begin the story in 1886. Haverty Stack says that by then,

Labor unions had been fighting for the eight-hour workday for years and years, but they'd only been

winning battles city by city. Their opponents were ever larger, spanning the nation. They needed a new strategy.

This was the era of the Second Industrial Revolution, the rise of corporate capitalism.

They needed to come together. And so that was the goal for 1886. Can I ask you why you're so

interested in this story? The more I investigated, the more I found this rich history in the United States that most people are not aware of.

How come this holiday that in the 19th teens drew 60,000 people to the streets in New York in 1939,

when the Communist Party had come to really

dominate the organization of the event, 700,000 people turned out in New York, 200,000 in the streets,

...