The Haymarket Conspiracy: Transatlantic Anarchist Networks traces the evolution of revolutionary anarchist ideas in Europe and their migration to the United States in the 1880s. A new history of the ...transatlantic origins of American anarchism, this study thoroughly debunks the dominant narrative through which most historians interpret the Haymarket Bombing and Trial of 1886-87._x000B__x000B_Challenging the view that there was no evidence connecting the eight convicted workers to the bomb throwing at the Haymarket rally, Timothy Messer-Kruse examines police investigations and trial proceedings that reveal the hidden transatlantic networks, the violent subculture, and the misunderstood beliefs of Gilded Age anarchists. Messer-Kruse documents how, in the 1880s, radicals on both sides of the Atlantic came to celebrate armed struggle as the one true way forward and began to prepare seriously for conflict. Within this milieu, he suggests the possibility of a "Haymarket conspiracy": a coordinated plan of attack in which the oft-martyred Haymarket radicals in fact posed a real threat to public order and safety. Drawing on new, never-before published historical evidence, The Haymarket Conspiracy provides a new means of understanding the revolutionary anarchist movement on its own terms rather than in the romantic ways in which its agents have been eulogized.
The Trial of the Haymarket Anarchists is the culmination of seven years of research into the 1886 Haymarket bombing and subsequent trial. It not only overturns the prevailing consensus on this event, ...it documents in detail how the basic facts, as far as they can be determined, have been distorted, obscured, or suppressed for seventy years.
In the 1920s, Toledo, Ohio, led the nation in manufacturing job growth. In summer 1931, Toledo suffered the worst banking crash of the Great Depression. Soon afterward, a greater percentage of the ...people in Toledo survived on federal relief than in any other American city. What caused one of America's most dynamic industrial cities to fall so far, so fast? Banksters, Bosses, and Smart Money uncovers the causes of one city’s economic collapse by tracing the interlocking directorships, political machines, and insider deals that made quick fortunes for the well-connected while jeopardizing the savings of tens of thousands of depositors. It documents how the power of the city’s financial elites continued even after the calamitous bank crash of 1931, skewing the liquidation of insolvent banks in their favor and shielding those responsible from criminal prosecution. By examining the social and political roots of the banking crisis in one community, Messer-Kruse demonstrates that the Great Depression cannot be understood only as an external force that crashed over communities, but also as a consequence of local power relations and financial decisions. Toledo’s example suggests that the Great Depression was made locally and spread globally, not the other way around.
This study examines the extent of the use of geographic code words in place of racial terms in daily news reporting. This is a case study of the only daily newspaper, the Toledo Blade, in the ...midwestern city of Toledo, Ohio. A data set was constructed by searching a nine year collection of Blade articles, available in full-text searchable format in a ProQuest database, that included the most frequently used directional terms and had specific street addresses (a total of 981 stories). Besides bibliographic data, each story was coded for its location and the general nature of the story. Street addresses were used to compile relevant census tract information on the proportion of minorities in each area referenced. These references were then plotted over a street map of Toledo revealing geographic distributions that do not relate to actual cardinal directions. Population data corresponding to each data point was then analyzed to show that directional terminology correlates with the concentration of minority population. Additionally, a comprehensive content analysis of all 21,667 Blade articles published in this period revealed racial differences in reporting. Such quantified observations are reinforced by examination of particular examples of racialized usage of geographic terms.
The reigning historical consensus is that the McCormick Riot of 3 May 1886 was a spontaneous conflict between strikers and scabs that provoked a brutal police attack. This re-examination of the ...evidence shows the complicated nature of work relations in the plant, the different interests and loyalties of various groups of McCormick employees, and the early involvement of Chicago's anarchists in exploiting McCormick's union tensions for their own purposes. New revelations detailing August Spies' private motives for revenge against the police are uncovered.
