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Between the 1880s and 1920s, a broad coalition of American dissidents, which included rabble-rousing cartoonists, civil liberties lawyers, socialist detectives, union organizers, and revolutionary martyrs, forged a culture of popular radicalism that directly challenged an emergent corporate capitalism. In this lecture, Dr. Cohen Illustrates how monopoly capitalists and their allies in government responded by expanding conspiracy laws and promoting conspiracy theories in an effort to destroy this anti-capitalist movement. The result was an escalating class conflict in which each side came to view the other as a criminal conspiracy.
Michael Mark Cohen is Associate Teaching Professor of American Studies and African American Studies. He earned his Ph.D. in American Studies from Yale University in 2004. His writings have appeared in Social Text, International Review of Social History, Radical History Review and Gawker.com.