Ph. D. University of California, Berkeley, 2000. 509 p. Adviser: Lawrence W. Levine. ISBN: 0-599-85965-2
DAI-A 61/07, p. 2886, Jan 2001

This dissertation examines anarchist journals, culture and communities in the period from 1886 to 1914. It "reveals an imaginative and constructive movement which actively participated in American society and articulated a regeneration of society in a distinctively American voice; which highlighted the significance of private roles and relationships in the realization of an anarchist community; and which expanded politics from an emphasis on institutions, parties, and government to one of power in private life. Anarchists thus emerged as leading advocates of individual freedom in manifold forms, from free love to free speech...

At a moment when many Americans turned to the federal government to address the problems of an industrializing order, anarchists opposed the state and looked to the individual as the locus for reform and to culture as their site for social change.

This study examines the ways in which agents of culture -journals, literature, and communities - were the means through which anarchists endeavored to transform social roles and relationships and create an innovative cultural radicalism.… American anarchists sustained their movement through their newspapers and journals, which served both as countercultures and as forums from which to address the larger culture.

Through these publications anarchists championed a prescient form of cultural politics which politicized issues of private and public life in their attention to sexuality, gender, and community. In their focus on gender, American anarchists revolutionized the social organization of intimate life in terms of marriage, maternity, and monogamy. They further addressed these concerns in their fiction, delineating how individual changes might result in broader sociopolitical transformations."