There’s evidence all around us that we are at the beginning of a new era of mass protests. An era that might be similar in some ways to previous ones in American history: the uprising that powered the War of Independence, the abolitionist crusade that led to the Civil War and the “new birth of freedom,” the great labor upheavals of the 1930s that gave us mass industrial unions and what we have of a welfare state, and the Black Freedom movement and protests against the Vietnam War decades later.

None of these protest eras have been exclusively American. The currents of emancipatory thinking that fueled the American Revolution also fueled the French Revolution; abolitionism spanned the Atlantic; the European protesters of 1968 were inspired by SNCC; and protests against the Vietnam War spread across the globe.

It is hard to fix a firm beginning for a sprawling, history-changing movement, which is inevitably fueled by disparate grievances and disparate inspirations. This current moment probably began with the Zapatistas, then erupted again in Tunisia and Tahrir Square, and again in the mass anti-austerity actions in Europe, including French riots, the protests of UK Uncut and the Spanish indignados, as well as student strikes in Quebec and Chile.