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Death in the Haymarket
Book Review : A great narrative history
Green offers a narrative history of Chicago’s Haymarket bombing in 1886, the infamous trial that followed, and the hanging of subsequently determined innocent men.
Chicago was then at the heart of the labour struggle for the eight-hour day, and we learn that
“workers’ struggles had often been met with shocking repression, and that when violence bred violence, when powerless laboring people struck back in anger, they often paid with their lives.”
The Haymarket episode became a seminal moment for the American labor movement, and Green takes us inside the personal, social, and cultural elements of this tragic event.
Evaluation of Haymarket includes the contention that a conservative bias against radicals, labour organisers, immigrants, and minorities was fundamental to the conflict as well as the view that execution of the anarchists saved the country from anarchy and was a moral and political victory for law and order.
A great narrative history about one of the most important events in the history of U.S. working people. The characters are well drawn, the context is laid out nicely and the analysis is first rate. It’s a sophisticated study without resorting to jargon.
It would be hard to find a more clear example of the importance of class conflict in American history than this book. The irony is that those unfamiliar with this concept are the same ones who are unlikely to read Death in the Haymarket.
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