Paul Avrich

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Paul Avrich
Manhattan, New York
OccupationHistorian
Years active1961–1999
Known forHistory of anarchism
Notable workThe Haymarket Tragedy, Anarchist Voices

Paul Avrich (August 4, 1931 – February 16, 2006) was an American

Kronstadt naval base rebellion
, and an oral history of the movement.

As an ally of the movement's major figures, he sought to challenge the portrayal of anarchists as amoral and violent, and collected papers from these figures that he donated as a 20,000-item collection to the Library of Congress.

Early and personal life

Paul Avrich was born August 4, 1931, in Brooklyn to parents of Jewish and Ukrainian heritage from

Piotr Kropotkin. Avrich was married and had two daughters and a sister.[2]

Career

Avrich was a historian of the 19th and early 20th century anarchist movement in Russia and the United States. He wrote ten books in his career, mostly about anarchism, including topics such as the 1886

Kronstadt Rebellion, and an oral history of the movement. As a teacher and historian of the anarchist movement, Avrich had sympathy and affection for the cause and became a trusted colleague of its major figures.[2] Accordingly, he sought to communicate to his students an affection and solidarity for anarchists "as people, rather than as militants" and challenged the perception of anarchists as amoral and violent. He wanted his work to resurrect the thought of marginalized anarchists, whom he saw as "pioneers of social justice" worth revisiting in the revival of libertarianism following the Vietnam War and second-wave feminism.[1]

Avrich joined

City University of New York Graduate Center faculty.[2] He received a Guggenheim Fellowship for Russian history in 1967 and a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship in 1972.[3][4] When named distinguished professor of history in 1982, his announcement quoted him: "Every good person deep down is an anarchist." He retired in 1999. Avrich collected books, photos, and papers from key anarchists and donated a 20,000-item collection to the Library of Congress.[2] He died on February 16, 2006, in Manhattan's Mount Sinai Hospital from complications due to Alzheimer's disease.[2]

His Soviet research and documents on the suppressed Kronstadt insurrection led to several books on anarchists in the Russian revolution, including

Ferrer Schools inspired by Francisco Ferrer. His 1984 book on the Haymarket Riot won the Philip Taft Labor History Book Award, and his 1991 book on Sacco and Vanzetti presented the pair as revolutionaries rather than philosophical anarchists. Avrich's last book, in 1995, compiled 30 years of interviews across the anarchist movement. Several of his works were nominated for Pulitzer Prizes.[1]

Works

References

  1. ^
    ISSN 0261-3077
    .
  2. ^
    ISSN 0362-4331
    .
  3. ^
    JSTOR 23605956
    .
  4. ^ "Paul H. Avrich". John Simon Guggenheim Foundation. Retrieved June 14, 2017.

Further reading

External links
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