The worlds that anarchists left behind, the worlds in which they lived, and the worlds they strove to create
Kenyon Zimmer is an assistant professor of history at the University of Texas at Arlington.
"Zimmer has produced a powerful text that brings to life numerous
forgotten rebels and significantly expands our understanding of
anti-statist social movements in the first half of the twentieth
century… This immaculately researched and carefully composed
monograph thus sets a new bar for the study of
anarchism."--Anarchist Studies
"Most students of US radicalism have long assumed that anarchism
was brought to the US in the late 19th and early 20th centuries by
immigrants from eastern and southern Europe. Zimmer demonstrates
that the real story is more complicated. Recommended."--Choice
"Zimmer's archival research is impressive… a fascinating
examination of the interplay of individuals of various ethnicities…
involved with anarchism and its sympathizers in San
Francisco."--International Review of Social History
"Well researched and eloquent."--Jewish Book Council
"This is likely to be an essential work on immigrant anarchism for
years to come."--H-Net Reviews
"Drawing on an impressive and unprecedented array of Yiddish- and
Italian-language sources, Zimmer details both the ideological
connections and ethnocultural obstacles that supported and
separated anarchist communities. . . . Zimmer's research and scope
is encyclopedic. . . . Zimmer's fine book is indispensable."--The
Journal of American History
"Immigrants against the State breaks new ground in anarchist
history and offers a timely contribution to the knowledge of
immigrant radicalism, past and present. It is essential reading for
students and scholars of radical and immigration history, and for
anyone interested in exploring immigrant lives marked by a
transnational collective identity that embraced diversity
regardless of the national, ethnic and racial divides.--Labour
History
"A vitally important transnational work that makes significant
interventions into the historiography of immigration, anarchism,
labor and the working class, and late-nineteenth to early
twentieth-century politics."--American Historical Review
"An extraordinarily well-documented and stimulating read."--Italian
American Review
"A beautiful, exceptionally well-researched work of transnational
history."--Canadian Journal of History
"Admirably, the author uses Italian- and Yiddish-language sources
to produce one of the most extensive accounts of anarchism in
twentieth-century America. One of the best histories of anarchism
in the United States."--Tony Michels, author of A Fire in Their
Hearts: Yiddish Socialists in New York
"I have been waiting for a book like this for a long time, one that
tells of the multiethnic and transnational world of early
twentieth-century anarchism, not just from the perspective of the
notorious figures, but from the grass roots. Zimmer is both a
highly gifted storyteller and a meticulous, careful researcher
whose account follows this history through a truly astonishing
range of sources in Yiddish, Italian, Spanish, German, and English,
from archives across the globe. This is the new generation of
transnational working-class history at its very best."--Jennifer
Guglielmo, author of Living the Revolution: Italian Women's
Resistance and Radicalism in New York City, 1880–1945
"A century ago, anarchists were everywhere, a movement in constant
movement. Having mastered the languages of the two largest groups
of immigrant anarchists in the United States, Kenyon Zimmer paints
intimate portraits of their Yiddish- and Italian-speaking worlds.
The book will be required reading for all scholars of immigrant
radicalism. More broadly, anyone interested in the complex
intersections of class, mobility, and culture in our own times will
find much to ponder in the cosmopolitanism and internationalism
immigrants created as they responded to the violent nationalist
politics of their own times."--Donna R. Gabaccia, author of
Immigration and American Diversity: A Social and Cultural History
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