ABSTRACT
What happened on the streets of San Francisco on the afternoon of July 22, 1916, seemed to pull at the fabric of the country. A horrific act, the deaths of 10 innocent victims alarmed citizens from coast to coast, and the events that tenuous summer represented a larger pivotal stage in American history. The San Francisco bombing stands as an unexplored, yet characteristic and significant, event during a decisive time in American history. The Preparedness Day Bombing was not the first, nor was it the last moment of leftist terrorism and radicalism in US history, but it offers us a valuable lens into quite possibly the apex moment of a much longer history, in a different America where violence was a more prevalent and oft-used tool of dissent. The bombings and attacks of this period also have intimate parallels with contemporary acts of domestic terrorism, such as Oklahoma City, the Atlanta Olympics, and the Boston Marathon.
