In the year that saw the start of World War I, the United States was itself on the verge of revolution: industrial depression in the east, striking coal miners in Colorado, and increasingly tense relations with Mexico. "There was blood in the air that year," a witness later recalled, "there truly was." In New York, the year had opened with bright expectations, but 1914 quickly tumbled into disillusionment and violence. For John Purroy Mitchel, the city's new "boy mayor," the trouble started in January, when a crushing winter caused homeless shelters to overflow. By April, anarchist throngs paraded past industrialists' mansions, and tens of thousands filled Union Square demanding "Bread or Revolution." Then, on July 4, 1914, a detonation destroyed a seven-story Harlem tenement. It was the largest explosion the city had ever known. Among the dead were three bombmakers; incited by anarchist Alexander Berkman, they had been preparing to dynamite the estate of John D. Rockefeller Jr., son of a plutocratic dynasty and widely vilified for a massacre of his company's striking workers in Colorado earlier that spring. More Powerful Than Dynamite charts how anarchist anger, progressive idealism, and plutocratic paternalism converged in that July explosion. Its cast ranges from celebrated figures such as Emma Goldman, Upton Sinclair, and Andrew Carnegie to the fascinating and heretofore little known: Frank Tannenbaum, a homeless teenager who dared to lead his followers into the city's churches; police inspector Max Schmittberger, too honest for his department and too crooked for everyone else; and Becky Edelsohn, a young anarchist known for her red tights and for spitting in millionaires' faces. Historian and journalist Thai Jones creates a fascinating portrait of a city on the edge of chaos coming to terms with modernity.

John Reed was one of America's most dynamic journalists during the World War I decade. An unabashed advocate for the working class and an outspoken critic of capitalism, Reed was a star reporter before his relentless crusade turned him into a target of the U.S. government. Reed set the standard for descriptive writing at labor strikes in New Jersey and Colorado, in Mexico while riding with Pancho Villa, in Germany's trenches, and in Russia. America had no shortage of rebels, socialists, anarchists and revolutionaries at that time--but with his outsized personality and command of language and audiences, Reed may have been the most dangerous rebel of them all. Neither adversaries nor allies expected Reed to go the distance (or to Russia) with his convictions. He seemed to enjoy life and merriment too much to sacrifice everything for a second American revolution. But they all underestimated the anger that fueled him, the memory of a father who sacrificed his reputation to fight white-collar crime. This career biography details Reed's extraordinary decade before his death at age 32--a chaotic period of constant movement and remarkable accomplishment--while placing him in context among those who shaped him and touching upon the people with whom he worked.

This book looks at the inception, composition, and 1907 publication of The Secret Agent, one of Joseph Conrad’s most highly regarded political novels and a core text of literary modernism. David Mulry examines the development and revisions of the novel through the stages of the holograph manuscript, first as a short story, then as a serialized sensation fiction in Ridgway’s Militant Weekly for the American market, before it was extensively revised and published in novel form. Presciently anticipating the climate of modern terror, Conrad’s text responds to the failed Greenwich Bombing, the first anarchist atrocity to occur on English soil. This book charts its historical and cultural milieu via press and anarchist accounts of the bombing, to place Conrad foremost among the dynamite fiction of revolutionary anarchism and terrorism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.