Date of Award
2015
Call Number
F59.B17 S88 2015
Document Type
Open Access Thesis
Degree Name
Master of Arts (MA)
Department
American New England Studies
First Advisor
Kent Ryden
Second Advisor
Ardis Cameron
Third Advisor
Manuel Avalos,PhD., Dean
Keywords
Robert Burns memorial, assination of Chief Brown, reshaping ethnic identity
Abstract
This thesis investigates Men Against Granite, an oral history project undertaken by the Writer's Program in Barre, Vermont in the late 1930's and 40s. Thirty years earlier , Barre was an important site in the transnational Italian Left, but the Men Against Granite interviews present a curiously depoliticized place. The following pages explore national and local rhetoric that formed a composite "radical Italian," a racialized identity that set Italian immigrants apart and legitimized state repression . In response, second-generation immigrants , including project writer Mari Tomasi, used the interviews to reshape themselves and their pasts as "American," in part by eschewing subversive politics and conforming to regionalist narratives of the period.
Recommended Citation
Swasey, Elizabeth D. MA, "Ghost Stories: Race, Immigration and Radicalism in Barre, Vermont" (2015). All Student Scholarship. 145.
https://digitalcommons.usm.maine.edu/etd/145
