UID:
almafu_9958351917002883
Format:
1 online resource(320p.) :
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illustrations.
Edition:
Electronic reproduction. : Harvard University Press, 2011. Mode of access: World Wide Web.
Edition:
System requirements: Web browser.
Edition:
Access may be restricted to users at subscribing institutions.
ISBN:
9780674066618
Series Statement:
The John Harvard Library
Content:
In 1892, unrepentant anarchists Alexander Berkman, Henry Bauer, and Carl Nold were sent to the Western Pennsylvania State Penitentiary for the attempted assassination of steel tycoon Henry Clay Frick. Searching for a way to continue their radical politics and to proselytize among their fellow inmates, these men circulated messages of hope and engagement via primitive means and sympathetic prisoners. On odd bits of paper, in German and in English, they shared their thoughts and feelings in a handwritten clandestine magazine called "Prison Blossoms." This extraordinary series of essays on anarchism and revolutionary deeds, of prison portraits and narratives of homosexuality among inmates, and utopian poems and fables of a new world to come not only exposed the brutal conditions in American prisons, where punishment cells and starvation diets reigned, but expressed a continuing faith in the "beautiful ideal" of communal anarchism.Most of the "Prison Blossoms" were smuggled out of the penitentiary to fellow comrades, including Emma Goldman, as the nucleus of an exposé of prison conditions in America’s Gilded Age. Those that survived relatively unrecognized for a century in an international archive are here transcribed, translated, edited, and published for the first time. Born at a unique historical moment, when European anarchism and American labor unrest converged, as each sought to repel the excesses of monopoly capitalism, these prison blossoms peer into the heart of political radicalism and its fervent hope of freedom from state and religious coercion.
Content:
Published here for the first time is a crucial document in the history of American radicalism—the "Prison Blossoms," a series of essays, narratives, poems, and fables composed by three activist anarchists imprisoned for the 1892 assault on anti-union steel tycoon Henry Clay Frick.
Note:
Frontmatter --
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Contents --
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Note on the Text --
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Introduction --
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CHAPTER 1. Capital and the Battle on the Monongahela /
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CHAPTER 2. A Fateful Leaflet /
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CHAPTER 3. Autobiographical Sketches /
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CHAPTER 4. Jail Experiences /
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CHAPTER 5. Further Arrests /
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CHAPTER 6. An American Court Farce /
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CHAPTER 7. Two Further Court Farces /
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CHAPTER 8. A Few Words as to My Deed /
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CHAPTER 9. The Red Bugbear /
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CHAPTER 10. Tolstoi or Bakunin? /
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CHAPTER 11. Our Prison Life: Second Half (February 1895–May 1897 /
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CHAPTER 12. Penitentiary Administration and Treatment of Prisoners /
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CHAPTER 13. The Treatment of Prisoner A-444, in His Own Words --
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CHAPTER 14. The Shop-Screw /
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CHAPTER 15. The Trusted Prisoner /
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CHAPTER 16. Dialogue between Two Prisoners /
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CHAPTER 17. A Morning Conversation between Dutch and Mike (Two Prisoners) /
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CHAPTER 18. Prisons and Crime /
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CHAPTER 19. Prisons and Crime /
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CHAPTER 20. Prisons and Crime /
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CHAPTER 21. Libertas: An Orthographical Study /
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CHAPTER 22. The Vision in the Penitentiary Cell /
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CHAPTER 23. The Sinking Ship: A Parable /
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CHAPTER 24. Winter Sun for My Prison Colleagues M G, 1 January 1896 /
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APPENDIX 1. Last Days in the Penitentiary: Excerpts from the Diary of Alexander Berkman --
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APPENDIX 2. Alexander Berkman’s Bibliography --
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Notes --
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Further Reading --
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Acknowledgments.
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In English.
Language:
English
DOI:
10.4159/harvard.9780674066618
URL:
https://doi.org/10.4159/harvard.9780674066618
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