Translated from German articles in the Neue Zeit

A revolutionary in Germany in 1848-49, a communist, a friend and comrade of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Friedrich Adolph Sorge emigrated to the United States in 1852 and spent the rest of his life in the New World, daily involved in the struggles which the workers’ movement led in that rising industrial power. The role Sorge took on himself for almost half a century was, as Engels suggested, “to go in for any real general working-class movement, accept its actual starting points as such and work it gradually up to the theoretical level by pointing out how every mistake made, every reverse suffered, was a necessary consequence of mistaken theoretical views in the original programme”. Between 1890 and 1895, in a series of articles appeared in the Neue Zeit, Sorge reviewed the events of the American workers’ movement from 1783 to 1892, making the first coherent attempt to write its scientific history and earning Engels’ praise: “The articles are the best and only authentic writings we have about the American movement.” The present edition includes the first Italian translation of these articles.