ELI5: Explain Like I'm 5

Molly Maguires

The Molly Maguires were a group of people who lived a long time ago in Ireland and America. They were workers in coal mines, which is where they dug up coal from the ground so people could use it as fuel for things like heating their homes and cooking food.

The Molly Maguires were upset because they thought they were being treated unfairly by their bosses. They didn't think they were getting paid enough money for the hard work they were doing, and they didn't think their bosses were treating them very nicely.

So the Molly Maguires decided to form a group to protest against their bosses. They would talk to each other secretly, and they would sometimes do things to try to scare their bosses into treating them better. Sometimes they would even set things on fire or do other things that were not very nice. They even had their own secret language and codes that only they could understand.

Eventually, some people started to get scared of the Molly Maguires, and they thought the group was becoming too powerful. So the police started to investigate them and arrest some of their members. Some people thought that the Molly Maguires were actually a group of criminals who were using their protests as an excuse to do bad things.

In the end, many of the Molly Maguires were put on trial and some of them were even found guilty of crimes like murder. Although some people still see the Molly Maguires as heroes who were fighting for workers' rights, others see them as criminals who broke the law.