Beverly Gage

Beverly Gage is the author of The Day Wall Street Exploded.

From her Q & A with Randy Dotinga about how the Boston Marathon bombing compares to the 1920 Wall Street attack:

Q: What struck you as you learned about this week's bombing in Boston?

A: We think of these kinds of mass bombings as being symptomatic of the terrible things about our own contemporary world, at least since Oklahoma City. But this kind of event has been going on as long as technology has existed to set off bombs in crowded places.

Q: Was this fact of history the reason you wrote the book?

A: I set out to write that book because I came across a mention of the 1920 bombing, which killed 38 people and injured hundreds more people, many of them quite seriously. I was shocked that I had never heard of this. What's going on that allowed this big event to be lost to history?

The other thing that surprised me was how many people at that time were saying "Ah ha! Of course. We all knew this would come."

I thought, "What? How did they assume that?"

I began to look not only into anti-Wall Street history but also the long history of anti-capitalist bombings that had been going on for 30 to 40 years, going back to the Haymarket bombing in 1866 [in Chicago], the most famous of them all, all the way up to the bombing of the Los Angeles Times in 1910, the bombing at a Preparedness Day parade in 1916 in San Francisco, and a series of coordinated bomb attacks in a number of different American cities, including...[read on]

Visit Beverly Gage's Yale faculty webpage, and learn more about The Day Wall Street Exploded at the Oxford University Press website.

Learn about Beverly Gage's five best books about terror in America from another era.

The Page 99 Test: The Day Wall Street Exploded.

--Marshal Zeringue