[1] The beginning of the New Current is usually given as 1886, when the movement's newspaper, Dienas Lapa ("The Page of the Day"), was founded by Pēteris Bisenieks, who ran the Riga Latvian Craftsmen's Credit Union.
Under Rainis and Stučka—the latter was again editor in 1896-97 -- Dienas Lapa turned to socialism; shut down by the Ministry of the Interior in 1897, the paper took a moderate turn under the editorship of the philosopher and publicist Pēteris Zālīte (formerly an editor of Mājas Viesis—see the Young Latvians article) between 1899 and 1903; despite its moderation under Zālīte, the paper was again shut down by the censors, re-emerging in 1905 as the Social Democratic newspaper before its permanent closure.
[2] The historian Arveds Švābe describes the New Current as "connected to the political awakening of the Latvian working class, its first organizations, and the propagandization of socialist ideas.".
[3] Most historians point to what the painter Apsīšu Jēkabs called "the beginning of a cleft between the Latvian farmer and his farm hand" in the 1870s,[4] and by 1897 there were 591 656 landless peasants in what is now Latvia (compared to 418 028 smallholders and their dependents).
This "luggage with the dangerous contents," as the historian Uldis Ģērmanis called it, was the seed of the Latvian Social Democratic Party.