The Pistol in the Privy: Myths and Contexts of Southern Italian Violence in the Anthracite Coalfields of Northeast Pennsylvania
Author(s): Michael P Roller
Year: 2016
Summary
The discovery of a revolver in the privy deposits of a home in a coal company town in the anthracite region of Northeast Pennsylvania evokes a long history of Southern Italian racialization as violent and vindictive by dominating groups. These imagined characteristics mobilized the privileged to fear, and thereby act to contain or exclude Southern Italian laborers wherever they lived. At the same time a transnational context reveals complex historical continuities when considered through accounts of Black Hand banditry in the region, possibly transplanted from the homeland context of North Italian conquest to Gilded Age Industrial Capitalism. Contextualizing these criminal activities in contexts of structural violence, sovereign and capitalist, provides surprising continuities and ruptures. And then sometimes.... a gun is just a gun.
Cite this Record
The Pistol in the Privy: Myths and Contexts of Southern Italian Violence in the Anthracite Coalfields of Northeast Pennsylvania. Michael P Roller. Presented at Society for Historical Archaeology, Washington, D.C. 2016 ( tDAR id: 434327)
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Keywords
General
Immigration
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Labor
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Violence
Geographic Keywords
North America
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United States of America
Temporal Keywords
20th Century
Spatial Coverage
min long: -129.199; min lat: 24.495 ; max long: -66.973; max lat: 49.359 ;
Individual & Institutional Roles
Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology
Record Identifiers
PaperId(s): 568