Immigrants against the State: Yiddish and Italian Anarchism in America (Working Class in American History)

From the 1880s through the 1940s, tens of thousands of first- and second-generation immigrants embraced the anarchist cause after arriving on American shores. Kenyon Zimmer explores why these migrants turned to anarchism, and how their adoption of its ideology shaped their identities, experiences, and actions.
 
Zimmer focuses on Italians and Eastern European Jews in San Francisco, New York City, and Paterson, New Jersey. Tracing the movement's changing fortunes from the pre–World War I era through the Spanish Civil War, Zimmer argues that anarchists, opposed to both American and Old World nationalism, severed all attachments to their nations of origin but also resisted assimilation into their host society. Their radical cosmopolitan outlook and identity instead embraced diversity and extended solidarity across national, ethnic, and racial divides. Though ultimately unable to withstand the onslaught of Americanism and other nationalisms, the anarchist movement nonetheless provided a shining example of a transnational collective identity delinked from the nation-state and racial hierarchies.

• We Are the Revolutionists: German-Speaking Immigrants and American Abolitionists after 1848 (Race in the Atlantic World, 1700–1900 Ser.)
• Living the Revolution: Italian Women's Resistance and Radicalism in New York City, 1880-1945 (Gender and American Culture)
• The Populist Vision
• Thomas Paine and the Promise of America
• Surviving Wounded Knee: The Lakotas and the Politics of Memory
• The Rabbi's Atheist Daughter: Ernestine Rose, International Feminist Pioneer
• Imperfect Strangers: Americans, Arabs, and U.S.–Middle East Relations in the 1970s (The United States in the World)
• The War on Alcohol: Prohibition and the Rise of the American State
• Reconstruction's Ragged Edge: The Politics of Postwar Life in the Southern Mountains (Civil War America)
• Line in the Sand: A History of the Western U.S.-Mexico Border (America in the World)