Charcoal and Blood is a detailed account of a heinous crime perpetrated on Italian immigrants engaged in the production of charcoal on Nevada’s mining frontier at the close of the nineteenth century. On August 18, 1879, in a canyon near Fish Creek, outside Eureka, Nevada, five Italian charcoal burners were slain and six more were wounded, while fourteen were taken prisoner by a sheriff’s posse.

Through meticulous research on the event, relying on such primary sources as newspaper articles, author Silvio Manno provides the only comprehensive account of Eureka’s charcoal crisis and what came to be known as the Fish Creek Massacre. This is a well-documented narrative history of an important instance of class and ethnic conflict in the West. Readers interested in Nevada history, Italian American history, frontier trade unionism, and mining in the West will find this book a unique examination of an incident that occurred almost a century and a half ago and that has, until now, been largely overlooked.

An examination of Italian immigrants and their children in the early twentieth century, A New Language, A New World is the first full-length historical case study of one immigrant group's experience with language in America. Incorporating the interdisciplinary literature on language within a historical framework, Nancy C. Carnevale illustrates the complexity of the topic of language in American immigrant life. By looking at language from the perspectives of both immigrants and the dominant culture as well as their interaction, this book reveals the role of language in the formation of ethnic identity and the often coercive context within which immigrants must negotiate this process.