About Eras
Abolitionism & the Slave Power (1850–1861)
The Haymarket Affair & the Anti-Anarchist Era (1886–1903)
The First Red Scare (1917–1920)
World War II: Japanese Incarceration & the First Smith Act Trials (1941–1945)
McCarthyism (1947–1957)
COINTELPRO (1956–1971)
The Vietnam War Era (1964–1975)
The American Indian Movement & Wounded Knee (1973–1977)
The Reagan Era (1981–1989)
The Anti-Globalization Movement (1999–2001)
The War on Terror (2001–)
The Green Scare (2005–2010)
Occupy Wall Street (2011–2012)
Ferguson & the Movement for Black Lives (2014–2016)
Standing Rock & the #NoDAPL Water Protectors (2016–2017)
J20: The Inauguration Day Prosecutions (2017)
The George Floyd Uprising (2020)
The Stop Cop City Era (2022–)
The Trump-Era Crackdown on Palestine Solidarity (2024–)
Civil Rights & Black Power
THE FIRST RED SCARE (1917–1920)
Triggered by U.S. entry into World War I and the Russian Revolution, the First Red Scare federalized political prosecution through the Espionage Act of 1917 and the Sedition Act of 1918. The 1917 IWW mass trial in Chicago, the prosecutions of Eugene V. Debs and Victor L. Berger, the November 1919–January 1920 Palmer Raids, and the deportation of Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman to Soviet Russia all came out of this period.