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Ghost Stories: Race, Immigration And Radicalism In Barre, Vermont, Elizabeth D. Swasey Ma

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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 …