The first character we encounter in Dana Spiotta’s 2006 novel Eat the Document is Mary Whittaker, a young woman who has just turned fugitive after planting a bomb in a property she believed to be empty, accidentally killing the housekeeper. The bombing was politically motivated: this opening sequence is set in 1972, and Mary was targeting the home of a board member whose company was developing a type of poison gas used in Vietnam. Mary is a member of the notorious Weatherman collective (which later changed its name to the Weather Underground, and eventually to the Weather Underground Organization), a militant splinter group of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), formed after the latter organisation’s implosion in 1969. The Weather Underground (whose original name comes from a line in Bob Dylan’s song Subterranean Homesick Blues) were responsible for planting bombs in corporate and government buildings to protest the intensifying US military involvement in Vietnam. Spiotta’s novel spans the decades after the explosion, when Mary lives under a fake identity; this takes us up to the year 2000. The novel explores the lasting impact of 1970s New Left activism: it considers the effect of militant protest on the individuals involved in politically-motivated violence, but also traces how some of the radical motives and deeds from that period are reworked into a tamer and more cynical response to economic and social injustice twenty-five years later. Another plot strand takes place in Seattle during the late 1990s, where a bookshop selling fringe texts called Prairie Fire Books (named after the Weather Underground’s 1974 book Prairie Fire: The Politics of Revolutionary Anti-Imperialism) becomes a central meeting point for adolescent left-wing groups, most of whom never carry out any acts of resistance. Spiotta’s novels more generally can be defined as works of historical archaeology: reworkings or reconsiderations of particular moments in America’s recent past – cultural, societal or political – in order to explore how this historical material asserts itself on the present day. Innocents and Others, published in 2016, is Spiotta’s fourth novel, and centres on the friendship between two women, Meadow Mori and Carrie Wexler.