Skip to main content
Trade Books For Courses Tradebooks for Courses

The Edge of Anarchy

The Railroad Barons, the Gilded Age, and the Greatest Labor Uprising in America

Jack Kelly

St. Martin's Press

opens in a new window
opens in a new window The Edge of Anarchy Download image

ISBN10: 1250128862
ISBN13: 9781250128867

Hardcover

320 Pages

$28.99

CA$37.99

Request Desk Copy
Request Exam Copy

TRADE BOOKS FOR COURSES NEWSLETTER

Sign up to receive information about new books, author events, and special offers.

Sign up now

The Edge of Anarchy offers a vivid account of the greatest uprising of workers in American history. At the pinnacle of the Gilded Age, a boycott of Pullman sleeping cars by hundreds of thousands of railroad employees brought commerce to a standstill across much of the country. Famine threatened, riots broke out along the rail lines. Soon the U.S. Army was on the march and gunfire rang from the streets of major cities.

This epochal tale offers fascinating portraits of two iconic characters of the age. George Pullman, who amassed a fortune by making train travel a pleasure, thought the model town that he built for his workers would erase urban squalor. Eugene Debs, founder of the nation’s first industrial union, was determined to wrench power away from the reigning plutocrats. The clash between the two men’s conflicting ideals pushed the country to what the U.S. Attorney General called “the ragged edge of anarchy.”

Many of the themes of The Edge of Anarchy could be taken from today’s headlines—upheaval in America’s industrial heartland, wage stagnation, breakneck technological change, and festering conflict over race, immigration, and inequality. With the country now in a New Gilded Age, this look back at the violent conflict of an earlier era offers illuminating perspectives along with a breathtaking story of a nation on the edge.

Reviews

Praise for The Edge of Anarchy

"Timely . . . Kelly tells this story with exhilaration . . . [The Edge of Anarchy] is not only a wonderful distillation of why the 1894 Pullman strike still matters, but it also presents an excellent overview of what life was like in 1894—full of technological promise, and yet riddled with class conflict and economic warfare."New York Journal of Books

Reviews from Goodreads

BOOK EXCERPTS

Read an Excerpt

1

Boss Town


On a May morning in 1893, President Grover Cleveland looked out on the most astounding metropolis ever built, the fabulous White City of the World’s Columbian Exposition. Staring back were the half-million...

About the author

Jack Kelly

JACK KELLY is a journalist, novelist, and historian, whose books include Band of Giants, which received the DAR's History Award Medal, and Heaven's Ditch. He has contributed to The Wall Street Journal, and other national periodicals, and is a New York Foundation for the Arts fellow. He has appeared on The History Channel and been interviewed on National Public Radio. He lives in New York's Hudson Valley.

Jeff Brouws

Band of Giants