This 2006 abridgement of the Chicago Eight court transcripts doesn’t expose anything new about the trial, or the events surrounding the Democratic National Convention of 1968. Indeed, the full 22,000 pages of transcript have been available to be read by the public for some time.

What this book does do is bring an important part of American political history back into view, at a time when the world is once again faced with questions regarding justice, political dissent and foreign wars of aggression. Weiner’s choice of excerpts boils down the trial to its most revealing and intense moments, capturing the feeling that it was a whole generation, rather than just eight defendants, who were being put on trial during those months in 1969. Both Weiner’s introduction and the afterword, written by defendant Tom Hayden, ensure that the book’s remit extends beyond the simple accounting of historical events, with Feiffer’s anarchic illustrations bringing the farce of the trial to life.

As well as providing context, Weiner’s introduction, The Sixties on Trial, and detailed chronology of the events at the Democratic Convention essentially aim at debunking the charge that the organisations protesting in Chicago were linked in a monolithic left wing conspiracy, an argument which is amusingly reinforced with the Abbie Hoffman quote on the cover: “Conspiracy? Hell, we couldn’t agree on lunch.”

Having been involved in both the 90s-00s anti-capitalist movement, and the movement against the Iraq war, I found Hayden’s addition particularly heartening. Where his co-defendants, the late Jerry Rubin and Rennie Davis, reneged on their youthful rebellion and became self-confessed yuppies, Hayden takes this opportunity to highlight his continuing loyalty to progressive politics by comparing Chicago ‘68 with recent, and larger, mobilisations such as the demonstration against the WTO in Seattle in 1999 and informing the reader how the FBI have updated their methods of repressing social movements.

Although Weiner makes clear that Conspiracy in The Streets is not a scholarly edition, I’d judge it to be suitable both for the casual reader, and as a source of information for those at the start of research concerning the events of the convention, trial, and the period in history. Not only does Weiner succeeded in breathing life into one piece of history, but with his choice of excerpts from both defence and prosecution, he has created a piece of work that stands as a metaphor for the numerous cultural and political conflicts that developed throughout the sixties as a decade.