It was after 10 p.m. on May 4, 1886, amid the greatest strike Chicago had ever seen. With clouds covering the moon, a mass meeting of workers was taking place in the Haymarket, an open-air farmers’ market stinking of horse manure and rotting vegetables. After the last orator had called for violence against the rich and powerful, a phalanx of police moved in to close things down.Then, someone threw a dynamite bomb. It exploded among the police, and the surviving cops opened fire on the crowd. Seven demonstrators died. Sixty cops were injured and seven of them later died of their wounds, although many believed even then that the injuries stemmed more from friendly fire than the TNT.

The resulting public panic, fanned by newspaper sensationalism, led to innumerable warrantless searches and mass arrests. Eight strike leaders, all self-proclaimed revolutionaries, were tried for conspiracy to commit murder. Little, if any, material evidence connected most of them to the bombing. The bomb thrower was never found. But the verdict was pre-ordained when the judge seated jurors who openly believed in the defendants’ guilt and ruled that proof of the defendants’ speeches and publications advocating violence to overthrow the established order was sufficient to establish guilt. Four were hanged, one committed suicide,and the others received life imprisonment.

Reading history gives us perspective on our own time: We better understand today’s problems by studying the crises endured by our ancestors. Yet, as L.P. Hartley wrote in “The Go-Between”: “The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.” We can’t understand late-19th-century Chicago without re-creating its context. Happily, in “Death in the Haymarket” (Pantheon Books, 383 pages, $26.95), the historian James Green skillfully shows us the time and place without padding. His sound, clean-limbed prose is a further blessing, yielding a good, fast-paced read driven by fascinating characters.

The 1880s saw Chicago’s workers endure a rapid shift from small shops, with personal relationships between owners and workers, to mass production plants, where corporate bureaucracy naturally led to alienation between employer and employee. Owners less in touch with the shop floor became impatient with traditional work practices, and the pace of production became machine-driven.

For Mr. Green, Cyrus McCormick Jr., son of the inventor of the mechanical harvester, exemplified the new generation of owners who responded with disdain when wage cuts met with strikes. These owners successfully persuaded city and state governments to view labor disputes as disorders requiring suppression by force, something new in American life. They saw no contradiction in organizing capital to create ever more profitable enterprises while forbidding workers to organize themselves – largely because unions supposedly interfered with the liberty of the contract between employer and individual employee.

Many workers found this disingenuous. They also found it un-American. Mr. Green subtly shows how popular thinking was molded by Jeffersonian and Jacksonian rhetoric (“Equal rights for all! Special privileges for none!”) long after economic realities made such language essentially meaningless in the workplace. Such rhetoric gave many workers a powerful sense of nostalgia: that something had been taken from them that could not be regained within the existing social order, and which also seemed to legitimize revolutionary violence against the rich.

Perhaps the most colorful, charismatic figures among the revolutionaries Mr. Green brings to life are an exotic American couple, Albert and Mary Parsons. The lanky, good-looking Albert had fought for the Confederacy and then supported Radical Reconstruction in Texas. While fighting Klansmen as a Texas militia colonel, Albert met, wooed, and won Mary, an intelligent, strikingly beautiful black woman. A devoted couple, they moved to Chicago after Reconstruction ended. Radicalized by their surroundings, the Parsons’ energy, eloquence, intelligence, and tireless agitation made them Chicago’s most notorious radicals long before the Haymarket explosion.His oration to the court before he was sentenced to death was long considered a masterpiece of American eloquence, and he refused to beg for clemency, insisting that he had committed no crime.

In 1893, the Illinois governor, John Peter Altgeld, reviewed the 2 million-word trial transcript and pardoned the surviving prisoners. He blasted the trial as unfair and illegal: The jury had been packed, the evidence fabricated, and the judge prejudiced. Altgeld noted, quite properly, that if a violent speech has somehow made the speaker guilty of another’s violent act, the prosecutor must prove that the actor heard or read the speech: As the state had never identified the bomber, Altgeld wrote, no connection had been shown “between the man who threw [the bomb] and these defendants.”

Mr. Green’s exploration of the revolutionaries and their world – their newspapers, social clubs, festivals, picnics, and fraternal organizations – humanizes men and women who, in their lifetimes, were constantly dehumanized by an astonishingly biased press. This book enriches our understanding of a road not taken: the socialist society envisioned by Parsons and his comrades.

Mr. Bryk last wrote for these pages about the New York City draft riots of 1863.