Prison blossoms : anarchist voices from the American past / Alexander Berkman, Henry Bauer, Carl Nold ; edited by Miriam Brody and Bonnie Buettner.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Berkman, Alexander, 1870-1936.

Series:

John Harvard library.

The John Harvard Library

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

State Penitentiary for the Western District of Pennsylvania.

Anarchists--United States--History.

Anarchists.

Prisoners--Pennsylvania--Biography.

Prisoners.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (320 p.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, Mass. : Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

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.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

Note on the Text

Introduction

PART I. Remembering Homestead - The Strike and the Jails

CHAPTER 1. Capital and the Battle on the Monongahela / NOLD, CARL

CHAPTER 2. A Fateful Leaflet / BAUER, HENRY

CHAPTER 3. Autobiographical Sketches / BERKMAN, ALEXANDER

CHAPTER 4. Jail Experiences / BERKMAN, ALEXANDER

CHAPTER 5. Further Arrests / NOLD, CARL

CHAPTER 6. An American Court Farce / BERKMAN, ALEXANDER

CHAPTER 7. Two Further Court Farces / BAUER, HENRY

PART II. Debating the Act-Assassination and Propaganda by Deed

CHAPTER 8. A Few Words as to My Deed / BERKMAN, ALEXANDER

CHAPTER 9. The Red Bugbear / NOLD, CARL / BAUER, HENRY

CHAPTER 10. Tolstoi or Bakunin? / NOLD, CARL

PART III. Surviving Western Pennsylvania Penitentiary

CHAPTER 11. Our Prison Life: Second Half (February 1895-May 1897 / BAUER, HENRY

CHAPTER 12. Penitentiary Administration and Treatment of Prisoners / BAUER, HENRY

CHAPTER 13. The Treatment of Prisoner A-444, in His Own Words

CHAPTER 14. The Shop-Screw / NOLD, CARL

CHAPTER 15. The Trusted Prisoner / NOLD, CARL

CHAPTER 16. Dialogue between Two Prisoners / NOLD, CARL

CHAPTER 17. A Morning Conversation between Dutch and Mike (Two Prisoners) / NOLD, CARL

PART IV. Defending Anarchy-The Case against Church and State

CHAPTER 18. Prisons and Crime / BERKMAN, ALEXANDER

CHAPTER 19. Prisons and Crime / BERKMAN, ALEXANDER

CHAPTER 20. Prisons and Crime / NOLD, CARL

CHAPTER 21. Libertas: An Orthographical Study / BERKMAN, ALEXANDER

CHAPTER 22. The Vision in the Penitentiary Cell / NOLD, CARL

CHAPTER 23. The Sinking Ship: A Parable / BERKMAN, ALEXANDER

CHAPTER 24. Winter Sun for My Prison Colleagues M & G, 1 January 1896 / NOLD, CARL

APPENDIX 1. Last Days in the Penitentiary: Excerpts from the Diary of Alexander Berkman

APPENDIX 2. Alexander Berkman's Bibliography

Notes

Further Reading

Acknowledgments

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN:

9780674066618

0674066618

9780674068186

0674068181

OCLC:

923119488