Michael Miller Topp, Those Without a Country: The Political Culture of Italian American Syndicalists. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001. 352 pp. $63.95 cloth; $22.95 paper.

Extract

Michael Miller Topp's Those Without a Country details the history of a generation of Italian–American syndicalists–leftists who advocated “revolution achieved through increasingly confrontational strikes waged by militant unions” (1) from the turn of the century to the late-1920s trial and execution of Sacco and Vanzetti. Drawing primarily on left-wing Italian-language newspapers, some Italian state archival materials, and a range of secondary sources in Italian and English, Topp focuses on several themes: the transnational nature of Italian-American syndicalists' ideas, institutions, and strategies; the complex interplay between syndicalists' masculinist, working-class, and Italian identities; and the significance this admittedly small number of syndicalists had on immigrant communities in the United States, on foreign policy in Italy, and on the Left in both.