Representing Sacco and Vanzetti

Italian anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were arrested outside Boston in 1920 and charged with robbing and killing a shoe factory paymaster and his guard. Though a prosecutor insisted they would be tried for murder and ‘nothing else’, their radical politics remained a focus of the 1921 trial. Contributors from a range of academic disciplines and artistic traditions apply critical and interpretive methodologies, assume novel historical perspectives, and analyze overlooked primary materials to illuminate previously unexplored aspects of the Sacco-Vanzetti case. The essays in this book analyze literary, artistic, and mass mediated representations of Sacco and Vanzetti, linking them to stereotypes of so-called ‘foreigners’ and ‘others’ that prevailed in the 1920s, and interrogating those images that prevail in our own age.