The Boston Globe, “This day in history”

In 1921, Italian-born anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were convicted in Dedham of murdering a shoe company paymaster and his guard. (Sacco and Vanzetti were executed six years later.) Continue Reading

The New Yorker, “The Secret Lessons of Soviet Children’s Poems”

As a teen-ager in tsarist Russia, Mayakovsky was already attending anarchist meetings and distributing socialist leaflets. A stint in prison converted him into a poet; the Revolution made him a Communist. Proclaiming himself a “Bolshevik in art,” Mayakovsky founded innumerable avant-gardist groups that variously inspired or horrified the Soviet authorities in the nineteen-twenties. When he […]

Gothamist, “No Jail Time For Skinhead Who Beat Columbia Students On LES”

Antifa, the loose-knit anarchist movement devoted to exposing and opposing those it deems fascists, has forcibly shut down speeches by right-wing figures and staged street fights with hard-right extremists in New York and elsewhere as Donald Trump’s campaign gained momentum and turned into a presidency. Right-wing skinheads and their left-wing counterparts have been mixing it […]

WNYC, “Muslim New Yorkers Now Have Someone Watching the Cops Who Watch Them”

As detailed in the book about post-9/11 Muslim surveillance, Enemies Within by Matt Apuzzo and Adam Goldman, the NYPD has long investigated specific communities: Italians and anarchists in the beginning of the 20th century; Germans and Japanese during World War II; Communists later on. Then in 1971, a lawsuit was filed against the NYPD after Vietnam War protesters […]

USA Today, “Why Europe has a greater terror problem than the United States”

On Wall Street in 1920, an explosion on the back of a horse-drawn carriage killed 30 people in an attack blamed on anarchists. Six years before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks by radical Muslims that killed nearly 3,000 people, there was the Oklahoma City truck bombing led by an anti-government fanatic that killed 168 people. […]