American Political Prisoners: Prosecutions under the Espionage and Sedition Acts

(Hardback)

Publishing Details

Classifications

Physical Properties

Description

This book is the first account of the personal lives of the nearly 1,000 long-term political prisoners arrested under various sedition laws for their opposition to World War I, their trade union activities, or their unpopular political or religious beliefs. Based on the author's exclusive access to the uncensored prison files of many of these prisoners, and information obtained under the federal Freedom of Information Act, Kohn relays the powerful prison experiences of some of America's most famous and colorful labor, socialist, and peace leaders. With over ten years of research, and access to tens of thousands of pages of never-before released U.S. Department of Justice records, Stephen Kohn has been able to recreate the actual prison experiences of these political prisoners.

Reviews

"What Stephen Kohn has done is to document what happened, with the kind of specific detail--names, places, punishments, the feelings of prisoners, the rationales of wardens and politicians--that brings history alive in the most immediate way, that goes behind statistics to individual human beings. He has been able to do this by an extraordinary feat of research, extracting from a reluctant government the records that are published for the first time in this book."-from the foreword by Howard Zinn Professor Emeritus Boston University
Stephen M. Kohn is a beacon on a dark time in American history, as the legal foundations were laid for subversion of the Constitution in the name of pacifists who dared to organize or even think out loud. Nuclear resisters: this is a warning!-The Nuclear Resister
"Stephen M. Kohn is a beacon on a dark time in American history, as the legal foundations were laid for subversion of the Constitution in the name of pacifists who dared to organize or even think out loud. Nuclear resisters: this is a warning!"-The Nuclear Resister

Author Bio

STEPHEN M. KOHN is a partner in the Washington, D.C., law firm of Kohn, Kohn & Colapinto, LLP, and Chairperson of the Board of Directors of the National Whistleblower Center. He is the former Director of Corporate Litigation for the Government Accountability Project. Nationally recognized for his scholarship and litigation on behalf of whistleblowers, Kohn in 1985 authored the first legal text on whistleblower law. He is the author of Concepts and Procedures in Whistleblower Law (Quorum, 2000).