So I was surprised to find a small-press copy of Mother Jones’s Autobiography at my local library.  It’s an old copy and doesn’t look like a high-frequency checkout.  I thought I was pretty lucky and started reading it.  She’s brief and almost dismissive of so many huge events in her own lifetime that it’s almost jaw-dropping.  The tragic death of her whole family, for example, elicits little more than a few sentences in the first chapter.  Her perspective in later chapters, though, is fascinating.  It’s a great primary source – her chapter on Haymarket is useful for that topic, for example.

The whole book is available online through the UPenn library.