B.A. (Queen's) M.A. (Trent), Ph.D. (Trent)
Thesis: The Anarchist Periodical Press in the United States: An Intertextual Study of Prison Blossoms, Free Society, and The Demonstrator
Examining Committee:
Alan O'Connor (Supervisor), Elaine Stavro and Jonathan Bordo
External Examiner: Jesse Cohn, Purdue University Northwest
Internal Examiner: Bryan Palmer
Chair: David Holdsworth
Abstract
This dissertation focuses on the English-language anarchist periodical press in the United States in the 1890s and early 1900s. Each of the three chapters of this dissertation examines one anarchist paper and its coverage of a specific issue. The first chapter focuses on Prison Blossoms, which was started by Alexander Berkman, Carl Nold, and Henry Bauer and written and circulated in the Western Penitentiary of Pennsylvania, and its engagement with Alexander Berkman's attempt to assassinate Henry Clay Frick. The second chapter examines Free Society, a weekly edited primarily by Abraham Isaak, and its contributors' writings on the assassination of President William McKinley by self-described anarchist Leon Czolgosz. Finally, the third chapter focuses on The Demonstrator, specifically its first volume which was edited by James F. Morton Jr. from the intentional community of Home, Washington, and the paper's work in supporting John Turner, the first anarchist targeted for deportation under the Immigration Act of 1903. Drawing upon critical discourse analysis, this dissertation incorporates examination of the context in which these papers were written (particularly the immediate concerns to which the papers' authors responded), the form and generic conventions of the anarchist press, including the approaches of the papers' respective editors, and the arguments advanced by their authors. It pays particular attention to the intertextuality of the anarchist press -- the ways in which those writing in anarchist papers addressed one another both within and across periodicals, generating anarchist thought through conversation and debate and enacting their anarchist ideals in the practice of publishing. This dissertation demonstrates that the anarchist periodical press, an element of anarchist history that has received little attention, offers important insights: it details how anarchists immediately responded to important issues of their time, and reveals the ways in which the emergence of anarchism was itself a collective effort, emerging from conversation, debate, and disagreement about how best to create radical change and what that change should look like.
Laura Greenwood holds an Honours Bachelor of Arts (2009) from Queen's University in Political Studies and Philosophy. She completed her Masters (2011) at Trent University in the Theory, Culture and Politics program. Her MA thesis, entitled “I Must First Take Stock of My Own Self: The Individual and the Not-Mass in Emma Goldman's Anarchism,” focused on themes of subjectivity, self-consititution, and radical political organizing in Goldman's work. Her PhD dissertation focuses on the anarchist periodical press in the United States in the 1890s and early 1900s, with emphasis on the papers Prison Blossoms (and its intervention in newspaper debates on Alexander Berkman's attempted assassination of Henry Clay Frick), Free Society (and the strategies its authors and editors use to counter dominant narratives of the assassination of William McKinley by Leon Czolgosz), and The Demonstrator (and its contributions to free speech organizing around the Supreme Court case United States ex rel. Turner v. Williams). Her research is grounded in primary source materials explored through archival research at the Labadie Collection at the University of Michigan.