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Written by James Green

• Format: Hardcover, 400 pages
• Publisher: Pantheon
• On Sale: March 7, 2006
• Price: $26.95
• ISBN: 978-0-375-42237-9 (0-375-42237-4)

about this book

As he captures the frustrations, tensions and heady victories of America’s first labor movement, Green also provides a rich portrait of Chicago, the Midwestern powerhouse of the Gilded Age. He describes the great factories and their owners like George Pullman who enjoyed enormous profits, and he gives an intimate view of the communities of immigrant employees who worked for them. The new power of the newspaper media is shown throughout, which, led by the legendary Chicago Tribune editor Joseph Medill, stirred up popular fears of the immigrants and radicals leading the unions.

Blending a gripping narrative, outsized characters and a panoramic portrait of a major social movement, this is an important addition to the history of American capitalism, and a moving story about the class tensions at the heart of Gilded Age America.


“For a few perilous days in the spring of 1886, Chicago shuddered with class warfare. James Green's recreation of that terrible moment exposes the deep divisions that marred America at the dawn of the industrial age. As the nation again struggles with wrenching economic change, we need to hear the story that Death in the Haymarket so passionately tells.” –Kevin Boyle, National Book Award-winning author of Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights and Murder in the Jazz Age

“Armed with the research tools of the historian and the literary skill of the novelist, Jim Green tells the dramatic story of Haymarket, and of the world of Chicago labor in the late 19th century, better than it has ever been told before.” –Eric Foner, author of Forever Free: The Story of Emancipation and Reconstruction

“The Haymarket affair was a pivotal event in U.S. history—for the left, for the labor movement, and for the nation’s political future. James Green explains its significance with a scholar’s sure grasp of context and a story-teller’s skill at weaving a dramatic narrative. This is radical history at its best.” —Michael Kazin, Professor of History, Georgetown University, and author of A Godly Hero: The Life of William Jennings Bryan

“Green’s dramatic narrative tells a powerful story about injustice, passion, prejudice, and fanaticism. It also makes a convincing case for the importance of Haymarket as a pivotal event that laid bare the competing visions of American society that animated conflicts over power and politics in 19th Century America that deserves to be remembered and debated.” —Eric Arnesen, Chicago Sunday Tribune

“If you want to know about the Haymarket affair, there's a dazzling array of sources to choose from. But if you must choose just one, read James Green's Death in the Haymarket. It tells the tale with extraordinary grace. Its simplicity of expression carries an understated dramatic charge that stays with you long after finishing. Its collection of newspaper illustrations, cartoons and photographs heightens the tactile evocation of an age that now seems so remote. Moreover, Green deftly uses the Haymarket story to peer deep inside the fears and hopes of a nation living on the knife-edge of social catastrophe. “
—Steve Fraser, The Nation

“No potboiler on the best-seller list can compete with Death in the Haymarket for narrative GRIP. Rich in character, profound in resonance, shot-through with violence, set in the immigrant neighborhoods, meeting halls, and saloons of the capitol of the American 19th century, here is a Chicago of life—part labor-history, part immigrant history, part courtroom drama. James Green's subject is the stuff of tragic drama—injustice and betrayal. Green renews that horror and shame for our time. ‘It takes a mighty theme to pull a mighty book, ‘ Herman Melville wrote, in what could be a one-line review of Death in the Haymarket."   —Jack Beatty, Senior Editor, The Atlantic Monthly

“Explains through the story of one dramatic nineteenth century incident the roots of many of the contemporary union movement’s strengths and weaknesses. Green’s research methods are those of a detective, his writing style that of a novelist, and his product is about the most fateful labor rally in American history.” —John Nichols, The Progressive