Nicola Sacco

From the Publisher: Electrocuted in 1927 for the murder of two guards in Massachusetts, the Italian-American anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti defied the verdict against them, maintaining their innocence to the end. Whether they were guilty continues to be the subject of debate today. First published in 1928, Sacco and Vanzetti's letters represent one of the great personal documents of the twentieth century: a volume of primary source material as famous for the splendor of its impassioned prose as for the brilliant light it sheds on the characters of the two dedicated anarchists who became the focus of worldwide attention.

On April 15, 1920, Frderick Albert Parmenter, paymaster, and Alessandro Berardelli, payroll guard, were fired upon and killed at South Braintree, Massachusetts. Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were charged on May 5, 1920, with the crime of the murders, were indicted on September 14, 1920, and put on trial from May 31 to July 14, 1921, in the Superior court at Dedham, Norfolk county, Massachusetts, Judge Webster Thayer presiding. A verict of guilty was rendered but sentence was not pronounced until April 9, 1927.

Principally an abridgement of the transcript of the trial as published in: The Sacco-Vanzetti case. 2nd ed. Mamaroneck, N.Y. : P. P. Appel, 1969; followed by a collection of remarks over the past 80 years about the trial and its significance.