PRISON BLOSSOMS by Alexander Berkman, Henry Bauer, Carl Nold ( 9780674050563 )

Item Details

Title:

PRISON BLOSSOMS
ANARCHIST VOICES FROM THE AMERICAN PAST

By:

Alexander Berkman, Henry Bauer, Carl Nold

Format:

Hardback

List price:

£35.95

Our price:

£28.76

Discount:

20% off

You save:

£7.19

ISBN 10:

0674050568

ISBN 13:

9780674050563

Availability:

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Stock:

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Publisher:

HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Pub. date:

5 May, 2011

Series:

The John Harvard Library

Pages:

320

Description:

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.

Synopsis:

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 expose 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.

US Grade:

College Graduate Student

Publication:

Imprint:

The Belknap Press

Returns:

Returnable

Some other items by this author:

1917 (PB)

A FRAGMENT OF THE PRISON EXPERIENCES (PB)

A FRAGMENT OF THE PRISON EXPERIENCES OF EMMA GOLDMAN AND ALEXANDER BERKMAN

A. B. C. OF ANARCHISM (PB)