Chicago, May 4, 1886. In the Haymarket region of the city, a peaceful Labor Day demonstration suddenly turns into a riot. The police intervene to maintain peace, but they soon use violence to quell the mob and a bomb is thrown, resulting in death and injuries to scores of people. In the widely publicized trial that followed, eight anarchists were condemned to death or life imprisonment, convicted of conspiracy, though none of them had actually thrown the bomb. A young Russian immigrant, Emma Goldman, had arrived just the previous year in the United States...

A pamphlet written by Alexander Berkman and Emma Goldman shortly before their deportation from the US in 1919.

Emma Goldman, the most famous anarchist in American history, shows the whole range of her iconoclastic thought in this collection of essays. Drawing from a wealth of illustrative material, including the examples of fellow anarchists and radicals of her own acquaintance, modern martyrs, dissident playwrights, poets, and authors, etc., she delineates the main themes of her philosophy with incisiveness and evangelical passion. Included among these themes are: a definition of decentralized anarchism...