Bartolomeo Vanzetti (1891-1927) and the Culture of Early 20th-Century Anarchism

FAIN: FZ-231708-15

Kevin Boyle
Northwestern University (Evanston, IL 60208-0001)

The research and writing of a study of anarchism in early 20th-century America, the nation's first age of terror.

The Splendid Dead is an intensely intimate history of political extremism in the early twentieth-century United States, centered on Bartolomeo Vanzetti, who as a young man joined an anarchist group public officials considered the most dangerous in the nation. It is not simply another Sacco-Vanzetti book. Rather, using the remarkable documentary record the celebrated case created, it explores on the most personal level what it meant to live and die for a movement that embraced terror as a path to social change. Through Vanzetti's story it will draw general readers into a movement many of them will find abhorrent,to help them see the complexity that runs through even the most troubling of political impulses. By so doing, it will enrich public discussion of the horrific violence that has done so much to shape and warp our world.