Editor’s Introduction

Occasionally, JSR has published a guest-edited issue, but relatively rarely. The current issue, then, is an exception to our general rule, because it includes a collection of articles that were originally presented as papers at a North American Anarchist Studies Network (NAASN) conference in San Francisco, California. The first five articles were collected and guest edited by Andrew D. Hoyt. Andrew studies transatlantic radical print culture and is interested in how transnational migrants deployed cultural tools, such as martyrologies, symbols, street festivals, and performances, to construct an antinationalist imagined community across much of the Atlantic basin. He is currently mapping the transnational networks of writers, editors, printers, distributors, and readers involved in the Cronaca Sovverisva (1903–20).

We begin with Andrew Hoyt’s introduction to the NAASN and its conferences. The five subsequent articles on anarchism are organized historically, beginning with Hilary Gordon’s “Diasporas of French Radicalism: Refugee and Exile Printers of Louisiana,” which discusses authors and printers in the mid-nineteenth-century South and the connections between French radicalism and the Louisiana region. The second and third articles concern new views of anarchism and the Spanish Civil War, beginning with Kenyon Zimmer’s “The Other Volunteers: American Anarchists and the Spanish Civil War, 1936–39” and Montse Feu’s “‘Transatlantic Trenches’ in Spanish Civil War Journalism: Félix Martí Ibáñez and the Exile Newspaper España Libre (Free Spain, New York City 1939–77),” which continue the theme of historical connections of American and European anarchists and radicals. These first three articles are primarily historical in approach.

The fourth article takes a more social-science approach. In it Michael Loadenthal discusses “Interpreting Insurrectionary Corpora: Qualitative-Quantitative Analysis of Clandestine Communiqués,” focusing quantitative analysis of primary source documents in the study of politically motivated violence, focusing in particular on communiqués from Mexico.

And the fifth from the anarchist collection of articles is Jeffrey Shantz and Dana Williams’s “An Anarchist in the Academy, a Sociologist in the Movement: The Life, Activism, and Ideas of Howard J. Ehrlich,” which profiles an academic who was both a sociologist and an anarchist at once.

We include also Daniel Opler’s “Music from the Vanguard: The Songs of the Composers Collective of New York, 1933–36,” which explores the interconnections of music and far-left politics of the 1930s.

Finally, we include five book reviews: Janelle Edwards on Adam Ewing’s The Age of Garvey: How a Jamaican Activist Created a Mass Movement and Changed Global Black Politics, Jessica Birch on Lindsey R. Swindall’s The Path to the Greater, Freer, Truer World: Southern Civil Rights and Anticolonialism, 1937–1955, Chris Elcock on Stephen Siff’s Acid Hype: American News Media and the Psychedelic Experience, John Huntington on David Cunningham’s Klansville, U.S.A.: The Rise and Fall of the Civil Rights–Era Ku Klux Klan, and Ryan McIlhenny on Ralph Young’s Dissent: The History of an American Idea.

We want to thank Andrew Hoyt for his work in creating this issue and all the anonymous peer reviewers who have assisted us and our authors with detailed and thoughtful readers’ reports and suggestions. We realize it often takes longer than authors would like, but we rely heavily on peer reviewers so that accepted articles have received multiple peer reviews in addition to copyediting before the journal goes into production—an extremely time-consuming process that nonetheless, in the end, is worth it.

As always, JSR seeks to provide a forum for the scholarly and dispassionate analysis of radicalism of many kinds and from many different perspectives. We expect that this theme of anarchism will be continued in a future issue, since we received a number of promising related articles. In addition, we have a forthcoming conversation with Ramona Africa on the history and nature of MOVE in Philadelphia, as well as articles on the Weather Underground and an array of other topics. Looking forward a year or so, we would like to see an issue on environmental radicalism and what we might term the emergent religion of ecologism. We continue to welcome a steady stream of...