The Yale University Library presents
Michael Willrich, Leff Families Professor of History, Brandeis University:
“American Anarchy: The Epic Struggle between Immigrant Radicals and the U.S. Government at the Dawn of the Twentieth Century.”
In the early 20th century, anarchists Emma Goldman, Alexander Berkman, and others championed a radical vision of a world without states, laws, or private property. They were heroes to many working-class immigrants, but others saw anarchism—militant and sometimes violent—as a terrifying foreign ideology. Government officials launched a decades-long “war on anarchy,” a program of spying, censorship, and deportation that established the modern surveillance state.
The lawyers who came to the anarchists’ defense advanced groundbreaking arguments for free speech and due process, inspiring the emergence of the civil liberties movement. Drawing on materials in the collections of Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, American Anarchy tells the gripping tale of anarchists, their allies, and their enemies, showing how their battles still shape our public life.
Willrich teaches undergraduate courses and graduate seminars on American political and legal history (from the colonial period to the present), crime and punishment in U.S. history, the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, and the literature of American history. He is the author of two other books and a former journalist whose work has appeared in the New York Times, The New Republic, The Washington Monthly, Washington City Paper, and Mother Jones.
After the presentation, the author will be available to sign copies of books that participants have purchased in advance. Books will not be sold at the event.