The Dramas of Haymarket

The Dramas of Haymarket, a Web site produced by the Chicago Historical Society and Northwestern University, examines selected materials from the society's Haymarket Affair Digital Collection, an electronic archive of the society's extensive holdings on the May 4, 1886, confrontation in Haymarket Square, Chicago. The Web site interprets these materials and places them in historical context, drawing on many other society resources. The site consists of seven major “acts,” organized in chronological sequence. Each contains a principal narrative and a collection of images and related texts. The choice to present these materials as “dramas” helps to “both organize and interpret” the contents of the digital collection as a whole but also, as the site creators concede, has certain “limitations and liabilities.” The Web site labels the Haymarket trial “one of the most notorious miscarriages of law in American history.” However, there is a subtle way in which a highly politicized episode seems depoliticized. The narratives can be read as flattening the differences among the historical players by characterizing everyone as an equivalent actor on the stage of history

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