Becoming Socialist: Print Culture and the Global Revolutionary Moment, 1880–1914

abstract:While socialist movements at the turn of the twentieth century emerged in distinctive contexts and faced unique challenges, they were bound together by the importance each attached to literacy and reading as the best means to awaken socialists' class consciousness and win new adherents. Through an examination of both flagship socialist newspapers and the memoir literature, this article traces the global emergence of socialist movements during the period 1880–1914, analyzing the role of both books and reading in the making of socialism, as well as government responses to the threat posed by socialist thought, from censorship and imprisonment to exile.