Academic literature on the topic 'Palmer Raids'

This chapter focuses on how the Palmer Raids of the winter of 1919–20 were the most draconian single instance of federal repression in the United States' peacetime history. Nothing in the McCarthy era can compare to the mass arrests and beatings, arbitrary incarcerations, and summary deportations that took place in dozens of cities across the nation. Capping off a year of industrial crisis, foreign insecurity, and political conflict, they helped solidify the divisions of the war years, institutionalizing them in an underground communist movement on one side and new patriotic organizations on t

This chapter examines the rise of Jacob Spolansky as part of a class of professional spies fostered by the growth of anticommunism during the First World War and the Red Scare. Spolansky was a migrant from Ukraine who arrived in the United States around 1910 and was recruited into the US Army's Military Intelligence Division as well as the Bureau of Investigation. During a thirty-year career, Spolansky rotated in and out of government and corporate service and spied on and infiltrated radical and labor organizations. He used legislative committees, business associations, and media outlets to e

This chapter examines the subtle, hidden, and magical racial politics of state policing through a reading of Culture Shock's “Terrorism” vignette, the history of policing in Bahia, and cases of police killings. Secret-police raids and assassinations are spectacular performances of authority that embody the magical codes of secrecy of the state. It then considers the white hand seen in community-policing signs in Salvador. The white hand positioned overtop the black hand, palms facing one another, and the black hand with fingers spread and the white hand clasped, gives the viewer the distinct i

In December 1919 the U.S. government, in the wake of the famed mail bombings (including to Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer) and the earlier Seattle General Strike, took a dramatic step. As a part of the broader anti-radical campaign under the Espionage and Sedition Acts, 249 known leftists and many Russians swept up in the famed Palmer Raids - specifically socialists and anarchists - boarded the Buford and set sail for Europe. Among the passengers were notable radicals like Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman. This work by the Departments of Justice and Labor stands is an important, though underexplored, physical act and moment that institutionalized the first American “Red Scare,” and revealed the broader tensions surrounding “loyalty,” the immigrant population, and anti-radicalism.

The weather was already growing wintry, and morning frosts congealed an earth saturated by autumn rains. The verdure had thickened, and its bright green stood out sharply against the brownish strips of winter rye trodden down by the cattle, and against the pale yellow...

The intoxicating fascination of archaeology and ancient ruins comes not from a melancholy romanticism brought on by shattered towers and collapsing walls, but from what the English novelist and traveler Rose Macaulay called “the soaring of the imagination into the high empyrean where huge episodes are tangled with myths and dreams; it is the stunning impact of world history on its amazed heirs. . . . It is less ruin-worship than the worship of a tremendous past.” Macaulay herself was an indefatigable traveler in search of the ghosts of the past. She looked at far more than the serried columns of the Parthenon in Athens or the ruins of Roman Palmyra. Her travels took her to sites that required imagination as well as some specialized knowledge. “Nineveh and Babylon . . . are, in fact, little more than mounds.” Macaulay was not the first to articulate this. The nineteenth-century English archaeologist Austen Henry Layard wrote of the “stern, shapeless mound rising like a hill from the scorched plain, the stupendous mass of brickwork occasionally laid bare by winter rains.” He was an archaeologist of energy and vast imagination, intoxicated with the grandeur of the Assyrian bas-reliefs on Nineveh’s palace walls—human figures, gods, kings, warriors, human-headed lions. Nineveh captivated the Victorians. “Is not Nineveh most delightful and prodigious?” wrote one young lady to her brother in India. “Papa says nothing so truly thrilling has happened in excavations since they found Pompeii.” Layard and others wrote books about the mighty palaces that once dazzled the ancient world. Inevitably, the tourists came to wander through the tunnels that Layard’s workers had carved into the city’s mounds. Inevitably, too, many of them succumbed to fever, recovering to remember an exotic underground world they had seen in their delirium. Today, you must rely on your restless imagination amid bare heaps of earth, desert on every side. You inescapably remember the words of the Old Testament prophet Zephaniah as you tread on twenty centuries of Assyrian history: “And he will stretch out his hand against the north, and destroy Assyria, and will make Nineveh a desolation, and dry like a wilderness. . . . How is she become a desolation, a place for beasts to lie down in!”

The Tibetan Plateau is by far the largest region of high elevation, averaging just above 5,000 metres above sea level, and the thickest crust, between 70 and 90 kilometres thick, anywhere in the world. This huge plateau region is very flat—lying in the internally drained parts of the Chang Tang in north and central Tibet, but in parts of the externally drained eastern Tibet, three or four mountain ranges larger and higher than the Alps rise above the frozen plateau. Some of the world’s largest and longest mountain ranges border the plateau, the ‘flaming mountains’ of the Tien Shan along the north-west, the Kun Lun along the north, the Longmen Shan in the east, and of course the mighty Himalaya forming the southern border of the plateau. The great trans-Himalayan mountain ranges of the Pamir and Karakoram are geologically part of the Asian plate and western Tibet but, as we have noted before, unlike Tibet, these ranges have incredibly high relief with 7- and 8-kilometre-high mountains and deeply eroded rivers and glacial valleys. The western part of the Tibetan Plateau is the highest, driest, and wildest area of Tibet. Here there is almost no rainfall and rivers that carry run-off from the bordering mountain ranges simply evaporate into saltpans or disappear underground. Rivers draining the Kun Lun flow north into the Takla Makan Desert, forming seasonal marshlands in the wet season and a dusty desert when the rivers run dry. The discovery of fossil tropical leaves, palm tree trunks, and even bones from miniature Miocene horses suggest that the climate may have been wetter in the past, but this is also dependent on the rise of the plateau. Exactly when Tibet rose to its present elevation is a matter of great debate. Nowadays the Indian Ocean monsoon winds sweep moisture-laden air over the Indian sub-continent during the summer months (late June–September). All the moisture is dumped as the summer monsoon, the torrential rains that sweep across India from south-east to north-west.