Overview

On the eve of World War I, a band of Indian immigrants living in the United States hatched an audacious plan to liberate their homeland from British colonial rule. Founded by a group of student radicals at UC Berkeley, the Ghadar Movement mounted one of the most significant challenges to the British Raj before the rise of the Indian National Congress under Gandhi-but unlike the INC, the Ghadar Movement advocated for a violent insurrection against colonial rule. From its bases on the West Coast of the US and Canada, the movement recruited thousands of supporters via its underground newspaper and sent hundreds of freedom fighters across the Pacific in an attempt to smuggle guns and seditious literature into India-an effort abetted by spies working for the German government, who were keen to undermine a wartime adversary. All the while, the Ghadar Movement was tracked by Britain's intelligence service, which eventually convinced the US government to crack down. The result was one of the most complex trials to date, culminating in a courtroom gun battle that shocked the nation. Scott Miller's Let My Country Awake is the first book to tell the story of this overlooked moment in Indian, and American, history -one that offers a new perspective on anticolonial struggle in the twentieth century.

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9780374609672

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Reviews

""The story of Ghadar (Urdu for ""revolt"") is dizzyingly complex, and Miller, a former foreign correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, has excavated a fascinating trove of archival material. Uniting Sikh loggers with high-caste Hindu intellectuals, Ghadar was part of a larger diasporic movement dedicated to liberating India from British control. . . . Let My Country Awake is at its strongest and most resonant when telling a very American story about immigration."" --Hari Kunzru, The New York Times Book Review ""This propulsive account . . . brings to vivid life a little-known episode of WWI--the U.S. crackdown on an American-based movement to oust the British from India . . . The result is a thrilling excavation of a forgotten revolutionary moment in American and world history."" --Publishers Weekly (starred review) ""Scott Miller tells a compelling and little-known story about India's freedom struggle--one involving a brave band of students and workers in America. This is a fascinating prism through which we see the wartime machinations of Germany, Britain, and the United States--and it all comes together in a made-for-Hollywood trial."" --Fareed Zakaria, host of CNN's GPS and author of Age of Revolutions ""In Let My Country Awake, Scott Miller has written a true-life international spy thriller that is both an education in a forgotten corner of American history and a compelling adventure filled with a well-crafted cast of larger-than-life characters who jump off the page. One improbable--yet true--event dramatically follows another, and the result is a riveting, page-turning read."" --Howard Blum, New York Times bestselling author of In the Enemy's House and Dark Invasion ""Scott Miller's Let My Country Awake is an audacious work of history which explores a now mostly forgotten effort by a group of freedom fighters to liberate India from colonial rule. Spanning multiple continents, the story blazes with gun-smuggling, espionage, and an explosive courtroom shootout--complicating our understanding of the fallout from the colonial world order during World War I. This original and well-researched work is a powerful reminder that today's immigration battles in the U.S. have long and tangled roots. Let My Country Awake makes a profound contribution to our understanding of the early twentieth century. --Julia Flynn Siler, New York Times bestselling author of Lost Kingdom and The White Devil's Daughters

""In Let My Country Awake, Scott Miller has written a true-life international spy thriller that is both an education in a forgotten corner of American history and a compelling adventure filled with a well-crafted cast of larger-than-life characters who jump off the page. One improbable--yet true--event dramatically follows another, and the result is a riveting, page-turning read."" --Howard Blum, New York Times bestselling author of In the Enemy's House and Dark Invasion

Author Information

Scott Miller is the author of two previous books: The President and the Assassin: McKinley, Terror, and Empire at the Dawn of the American Century and Agent 110: The American Spymaster and the German Resistance. A former foreign correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, he reported from more than twenty-five countries in Asia and Europe for two decades. He has been a contributor to CNBC and Britain's Sky News and appeared on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. He lives in Seattle with his wife, Karen, and a Labrador retriever, Lucy.

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