In the summer of 1886, eight anarchists went on trial for a murder the state could not prove they had committed.Unable to identify who threw the bomb at Haymarket, prosecutors built their case around…
History never answered who threw the Haymarket bomb. But it forever changed what Americans believed about labor, radicalism, and political dissent.As tens of thousands of Chicago workers walked off…
The Haymarket Affair did not begin with a bomb. It began with a movement.In the years before Haymarket, Chicago became the center of a growing labor revolt as workers demanded shorter hours, greater…
How can workers build power in an economy dominated by giant corporations and monopolies? To explore that question, we turn to the history of unionism and the rise of the American labor movement…
The moment when the belief that the United States was immune to class conflict was shattered. In July 1877, railroad workers across the United States stopped work. What began as a wage dispute in a…
Anarchism emerged not simply as a theory, but as a response to hunger, repression, industrial capitalism, and the growing power of the modern state.In this opening episode of Season 2, we trace…
In the wake of John Brown’s raid, Henry David Thoreau delivered one of the most forceful defenses of moral action in American history. While much of the North recoiled after Harpers Ferry, Thoreau…
In October of 1859, a small band of abolitionists led by John Brown seized the federal armory at Harpers Ferry, Virginia. Their goal was simple but audacious: to ignite a mass slave uprising and bring…
What began as a family quarrel within socialism would become a permanent schism that would shape every revolution that followed.When sailors at Kronstadt rose to demand “All power to the soviets, not…
For 72 days, the Paris Commune turned the capital into a living experiment in working-class democracy.Parks opened, palaces became public space, newspapers and clubs exploded with debate, and a wave…
