Beverly Gage teaches at Yale University and is the author of The Day Wall Street Exploded.For the Wall Street Journal, she named a five best list of books about terror in America from another era.
One title on the list:
Living My LifeRead about another book on the list.
by Emma Goldman (1931)
Emma Goldman(1869-1940) is best known today as a feminist forebear, an advocate of free love and birth control—just a couple of the controversial stands that made her America's most notorious anarchist a century ago. Written from exile in the 1930s, "Living My Life" traces a remarkably adventurous, contentious life, including herimmigration to New York in the 1880s and her deportation back to Russia three decades later. Goldman confesses in the book that she helped her lover and fellow anarchist Alexander Berkman plan an assassination attempt on industrial Henry Clay Frick in 1892. As she became more prominent Goldman turned cagey on the subject of violence, urging Americans to understand the political outrage fueling anarchist terrorism but not quite calling for the commission of violent deeds. Her memoir sometimes reads like an encyclopedia of assassinations, strikes, and protests—many of them lost to contemporary memory. Still, the book reveals Goldman's flair for the dramatic and her grasp of the way her personal and political life resonated with the great revolutionary conflicts of her age.
Visit Beverly Gage's Yale faculty webpage, and learn more about The Day Wall Street Exploded at the Oxford University Press website.
The Page 99 Test: The Day Wall Street Exploded.
--Marshal Zeringue
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