Why read Goddess of Anarchy?

Book cover of Goddess of Anarchy: The Life and Times of Lucy Parsons, American Radical

Book description

From a prize-winning historian, a new portrait of an extraordinary activist and the turbulent age in which she lived

Goddess of Anarchy recounts the formidable life of the militant writer, orator, and agitator Lucy Parsons. Born to an enslaved woman in Virginia in 1851 and raised in Texas-where she met…

Explore

Topics

Genres

When you buy books, we may earn a commission that helps keep our lights on (or join the rebellion as a member).

Why read it?

1 author picked Goddess of Anarchy as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

David Prior

Author

I found I could not turn away from Jones’s unsparing look at the life and times of Lucy Parsons, even though I’ve long been familiar with this period of American history.

Parsons was an anarchist agitator who worked and lived across the color line in gilded-age America. But she was also a reckless if savvy provocateur whose actions did lasting harm to many. Jones follows Parsons’s life from the slave south to Reconstruction-era Texas to the industrializing North.

Relentlessly researched and brilliantly told, the story is at once illuminating and deeply disturbing.

From David's 3 favorite reads in 2023.