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The Day Wall Street Exploded
Beverly Gage
Oxford University Press
February 2009
On Sale: January 28, 2009
416 pages ISBN: 019514824X EAN: 9780195148244 Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
Just after noon on September 16, 1920, as hundreds of
workers poured onto Wall Street for their lunchtime break, a
horse-drawn cart packed with dynamite exploded in a spray of
metal and fire, turning the busiest corner of the financial
center into a war zone. Thirty-nine people died and hundreds
more lay wounded, making the Wall Street explosion the worst
terrorist attack to that point in U.S. history. In The Day Wall Street Exploded, Beverly Gage tells the
story of that once infamous but now largely forgotten event.
Based on thousands of pages of Bureau of Investigation
reports, this historical detective saga traces the four-year
hunt for the perpetrators, a worldwide effort that spread as
far as Italy and the new Soviet nation. It also takes
readers back into the decades-long but little-known history
of homegrown terrorism that shaped American society a
century ago. The book delves into the lives of victims, suspects, and
investigators: world banking power J.P. Morgan, Jr.; labor
radical "Big Bill" Haywood; anarchist firebrands Emma
Goldman and Luigi Galleani; "America's Sherlock Holmes,"
William J. Burns; even a young J. Edgar Hoover. It grapples
as well with some of the most controversial events of its
day, including the rise of the Bureau of Investigation, the
federal campaign against immigrant "terrorists," the
grassroots effort to define and protect civil liberties, and
the establishment of anti-communism as the sine qua non of
American politics. Many Americans saw the destruction of the World Trade Center
as the first major terrorist attack on American soil, an act
of evil without precedent. The Day Wall Street Exploded
reminds us that terror, too, has a history.
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