Emma Goldman: A Documentary History of the American Years reconstructs the life of Emma Goldman through significant texts and documents. These volumes collect personal letters, lecture notes, newspaper articles, court transcripts, government surveillance reports, and numerous other documents, some of which appear here in English for the first time. Supplemented with thorough annotations, multiple appendixes, and detailed chronologies, the texts bring to life the memory of this singular, pivotal figure in American and European radical history. Volume 2: Making Speech Free, 1902-1909 extends many of the themes introduced in the previous volume, including Goldman's evolving attitudes toward political violence and social reform, intensified now by documentary accounts of the fomenting revolution in Russia and the legal opposition toward anarchism and labor organizing in the United States. Always an impassioned defender of free expression, Goldman's launch of her magazine Mother Earth in 1906 signaled a desire to bring radical thought into wider circulation, and its pages brought together modern literary and cultural ideas with a radical social agenda, quickly becoming a platform for her feminist critique, among her many other challenges to the status quo. With abundant examples from her writings and speeches, this volume details Goldman's emergence as one of American history's most fiercely outspoken opponents of hypocrisy and pretension in politics and public life.[Goldman's career] as her adoptive country's most notorious anarchist [is] richly displayed in these two volumes of documentary history.'' --London Review of Books A major contribution to the history of anarchism and its place in the broader left . . . . Reading these collections nearly recreates the experience of going to the library and jumping headfirst into archival research.--Against the Current''A magnificently scholarly volume rich in historical information, it is a book that historians and those writing about American social movements will mine for many years to come.''--Sharon Presley, Social Anarchism ''This volume, along with its predecessor and the larger microfilm collection of Goldman documents, is a real achievement and a major contribution to the study of the American left. It will, one hopes, inspire scholars, teachers, and undergraduate and graduate students to explore the history of that struggle between free speech and free assembly, on the one hand, and the combined forces of power, prudery, and patriotism, on the other.''--Francis G. Couvares, Labor History
