Bombing in Haymarket, 1886

A bomb thrown by an unknown assailant killed seven policemen at a Chicago union rally in 1886, sparking public hysteria that crippled the American labor movement until the 1930s and led to the wrongful executions of three men. Labor historian James Green revisits Haymarket, the decades of anti-immigrant and anti-union sentiment it helped inspire, the international controversy it created, and the cultural divide it exposed over who should have a voice in American public life and politics.

James Green, professor of history at the University of Massachusetts-Boston, is author of Death in the Haymarket: A Story of Chicago, the First Labor Movement, and the Bombing that Divided Gilded Age America. He has served as president of the Labor and Working Class History Association, as a lecturer in the Harvard Trade Union Program, and as research director for the PBS series "The Great Depression."  Dr. Green is a Distinguished Lecturer for the Organization of American Historians.