The dawn of the labor movement in the US is often overlooked in favor of the larger labor actions that took place in the early 1900s, but James Green provides an engaging account of the genesis of many of those actions in his review of the Haymarket Affair and the events leading up to it. The chapters preceding the event were by far the most interesting to me, as they concerned the state of labor and intersections with ethnic identities in the Chicago area in the post-Civil War decades. Most of this is a straight historical accounting - personal accounts and newspaper articles woven together to provide a view into the environment of the time. Unfortunately missing are any contextualizing economic or political analyses - how did wages compare to the costs of living, and how did that change over time? What were general economic conditions in the area and how did they relate to voting/policing patterns?

Later chapters focus on the admittedly fascinating but lurid and unrelated to labor movement details of the farcical trial of labor organizers for the bombing at the tail end of the Haymarket protest that killed a number of police officers and civilians. An examination of this injustice would be much more at home in a book on criminal law and jurisprudence, but distracted from the labor history earlier in the book.