Prison Blossoms : : Anarchist Voices from the American Past / / Bonnie Cleo Buettner, Alexander Berkman, Henry Bauer, Carl Nold, Miriam Brody.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter E-BOOK GESAMTPAKET / COMPLETE PACKAGE 2011
• VerfasserIn: Berkman, Alexander,; Bauer, Henry,; Buettner, Bonnie Cleo,; Nold, Carl,
• TeilnehmendeR: Bauer, Henry,; Buettner, Bonnie Cleo,; Nold, Carl,
• Place / Publishing House: Cambridge, MA : : Harvard University Press, , [2012]; ©2011
• Year of Publication: 2012
• Language: English
• Series: The John Harvard Library
• Physical Description: 1 online resource

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.

Table of 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