front cover of Assassins against the Old Order
Assassins against the Old Order
Italian Anarchist Violence in Fin de Siecle Europe
Nunzio Pernicone, Fraser Ottanelli
University of Illinois Press, 2018
The image of the anarchist assassin haunted the corridors of power and the popular imagination in the late nineteenth century. Fear spawned a gross but persistent stereotype: a swarthy "Italian" armed with a bloody knife or revolver and bred to violence by a combination of radical politics, madness, innate criminality, and poor genes. That Italian anarchists targeted--and even killed--high-profile figures added to their exaggerated, demonic image.

Nunzio Pernicone and Fraser M. Ottanelli dig into the transnational experiences and the historical, social, cultural, and political conditions behind the phenomenon of anarchist violence in Italy. Looking at political assassinations in the 1890s, they illuminate the public effort to equate anarchy's goals with violent overthrow. Throughout, Pernicone and Ottanelli combine a cutting-edge synthesis of the intellectual origins, milieu, and nature of Italian anarchist violence with vivid portraits of its major players and their still-misunderstood movement.

A bold challenge to conventional thinking, Assassins against the Old Order demolishes a century of myths surrounding anarchist violence and its practitioners.

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front cover of The Ohio State University in the Sixties
The Ohio State University in the Sixties
The Unraveling of the Old Order
William J. Shkurti
The Ohio State University Press, 2016
At 5:30 p.m. on May 6, 1970, an embattled Ohio State University President Novice G. Fawcett took the unprecedented step of closing down the university. Despite the presence of more than 1,500 armed highway patrol officers, Ohio National Guardsmen, deputy sheriffs, and Columbus city police, university and state officials feared they could not maintain order in the face of growing student protests. Students, faculty, and staff were ordered to leave; administrative offices, classrooms, and laboratories were closed. The campus was sealed off. Never in the first one hundred years of the university’s existence had such a drastic step been necessary.
 
Just a year earlier the campus seemed immune to such disruptions. President Nixon considered it safe enough to plan an address at commencement. Yet a year later the campus erupted into a spasm of violent protest exceeding even that of traditional hot spots like Berkeley and Wisconsin. How could conditions have changed so dramatically in just a few short months?
 
Using contemporary news stories, long overlooked archival materials, and first-person interviews, The Ohio State University in the Sixties explores how these tensions built up over years, why they converged when they did and how they forever changed the university.
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