Alexander Berkman

"The “first terrorist act in America,” as its perpetrator described it, occurred on July 23, 1892. Alexander Berkman, known as Sasha, a 20-year-old Russian immigrant outraged at the brutal suppression of the strike at Carnegie Steel’s Homestead plant, burst into the office of Henry Clay Frick, the plant’s manager, shot him twice, then tried to stab him. The attempted assassination, or attentat, was meant to inspire workers at Homestead and elsewhere to move beyond their fight for better wages into full revolt against the capitalist system: it was “an act of liberation,” Berkman said."