Awards
- Nominated for Ray and Pat Browne Award - Best Reference/Primary Source Work in Popular and American Culture 2012
Overview
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.
Full Product Details
Author: Alexander Berkman ,
Henry Bauer ,
Carl Nold ,
Miriam Brody
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Imprint: The Belknap Press
Dimensions:
Width: 14.00cm
, Height: 2.60cm
, Length: 21.00cm
Weight: 0.514kg
ISBN: 9780674050563
ISBN 10: 0674050568
Pages: 320
Publication Date: 05 May 2011
Audience:
General/trade
,
General
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active
Availability: Awaiting stock
The supplier is currently out of stock of this item. It will be ordered for you and placed on backorder. Once it does come back in stock, we will ship it out for you.
Reviews
These writings allow readers to examine the anarchists, who come off as well-read and articulate authors, quite different from the common view of anarchists at the time and somewhat since...Of interest to those studying the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era, political thought, and prisons, both historically and currently. A worthwhile purchase. -- S. A. Merriman Choice 20120101
Author Information
Miriam Brody is an independent scholar. Bonnie Buettner is Senior Lecturer of German Studies at Cornell University.
