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Donnelly
1890
A 19th-century populist's nightmare of 1988 New York — and the revolution that brings it down in ruins.
Caesar's Column
Ignatius Donnelly · 1890
Ignatius Donnelly was a Minnesota populist, congressman, and pseudo-scientist who in 1890 imagined a future America ruled by a handful of trust-fattened oligarchs, its middle class extinguished and its underclass armed underground for the reckoning. Caesar's Column predates Wells and Orwell as an anglophone dystopia, and its warnings about monopoly capital, surveillance, and engineered inequality still land with real force. It is also a document of its moment's worst instincts, and reading it honestly means reckoning with both.
40 chapters · 96,396 words · ~7.3 hr read
Contents
Letters
Gabriel Weltstein's forty letters home from 1988 New York — from wide-eyed visitor, through the Beggar's Home and the Brotherhood's underworld, to the night Caesar's column rises over the ruins.
- 1Chapter 1~19 min
- 2Chapter 2~7 min
- 3Chapter 3~17 min
- 4Chapter 4~11 min
- 5Chapter 5~9 min
- 6Chapter 6~14 min
- 7Chapter 7~8 min
- 8Chapter 8~10 min
- 9Chapter 9~17 min
- 10Chapter 10~4 min
- 11Chapter 11~17 min
- 12Chapter 12~22 min
- 13Chapter 13~9 min
- 14Chapter 14~13 min
- 15Chapter 15~7 min
- 16Chapter 16~3 min
- 17Chapter 17~9 min
- 18Chapter 18~11 min
- 19Chapter 19~9 min
- 20Chapter 20~27 min
- 21Chapter 21~20 min
- 22Chapter 22~10 min
- 23Chapter 23~9 min
- 24Chapter 24~12 min
- 25Chapter 25~12 min
- 26Chapter 26~6 min
- 27Chapter 27~4 min
- 28Chapter 28~10 min
- 29Chapter 29~14 min
- 30Chapter 30~6 min
- 31Chapter 31~6 min
- 32Chapter 32~6 min
- 33Chapter 33~7 min
- 34Chapter 34~6 min
- 35Chapter 35~9 min
- 36Chapter 36~11 min
- 37Chapter 37~7 min
- 38Chapter 38~11 min
- 39Chapter 39~7 min
- 40Chapter 40~22 min