Hey there backstory listeners, I'm Lizzie Peabody, host of Side Door, a podcast from the Smithsonian.

Side Door syniques listeners through the Smithsonian's Side Door to search for stories that can't be found anywhere else.

With the help of biologists, artists, historians, archaeologists, zookeepers, and astrophysicists,

I'm excited to announce a collaboration between Side Door and backstory about the history of dynamite

and how it was used in some unorthodox ways back in its heyday.

You're about to hear a preview of that episode featuring Tim Messer-Cruz of Bowling Green State University.

He describes how anarchists and social radicals used dynamite as a means to propel a social movement in the late 1800s,

and how one guy in particular, Lewis Ling, adopted dynamite as a weapon for his anarchist agenda.

Look out for the full show on November 1st.

In the meantime, you can learn more about Side Door in the episode notes.

It was sort of used for a full decade before the 1880s as a means of frightening the ruling class,

as a means of trying to explain one possible path towards a people's revolution.

It was used as a symbol of the great equalizer against the armies of the governments,

and certainly that's the way Lewis Ling and his associates used it right up until the day that Obama exploded in Chicago.

Because dynamite really appeared to them as the answer to a lot of the intractable problems that they faced,

how to organize the revolution, how to carry it forward, how to deal with the forces of the state.

One of the problems that dynamite addressed was the problem that had become evident by the 1870s,

that the power of governments was far and away excessive to that of the power of the people.

Even in a united working class, even a revolutionary action that was set in motion could easily be defeated by the organized forces of the government,

and then comes along dynamite, which was invented in 1867, but it wasn't really popularly known until maybe a decade later.

And once it came into being, it seemed to be the great equalizer between the people and formal military forces.

It seemed to be something that an average person could employ. They'd required no special training.

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