Andrew Hoyt

The following articles were presented at the NAASN conference held in March of 2015. NAASN is an acronym for the North American Anarchist Studies Network, an informal association of scholars interested in what has broadly been labeled “anarchist studies.” Inspired by the Anarchist Studies Network (ASN) based in the British Isles, NAASN seeks to bring together people to share their work at an annual gathering somewhere in the geographical area currently called North America. NAASN also functions year-round as a mutual aid system for researchers and writers. NAASN never charges any fees and is purely user controlled. For the last six years, ad hoc, autonomous, and self-motivated organizing committees have formed to host each conference. These organizing committees release the call for papers and accept all submissions. These groups are also responsible for finding the space for the event and putting together the conference guide, which organizes the submissions into panels and schedules them. During the actual conference, they are the ones who, along with a few spontaneous volunteers, make sure everything runs as smoothly as possible. For NAASN 2015, I had the pleasure of taking part in the five-person organizing committee. Having recently moved to the Bay Area I felt very lucky for the opportunity to help host such a gathering of radical scholars. Other members of our little group

R ecent innovations in digital humanities research tools have encouraged historians of radical social movements to employ theoretical approaches of network analysis that were originally pioneered by scholars in the quantitative sciences. These methodologies offer exciting new ways of organizing data and understanding the interconnection of people, ideas, and spaces. However, network analysis can provide the historian with much more than a way to turn social relationships into sophisticated digital maps. Indeed, network theory offers analytically rich vocabularies that can reshape the very way we think about informal and horizontally organized historical phenomenon. For example, anti-authoritarian radicals have often been labeled using the prevailing vertical vocabulary of institutional labor studies. This language implies a rigid social hierarchy that fails to meaningfully describe the complex, egalitarian relationship between participants in these grass-roots struggles. The metaphoric sense of motion implied in the term “social movement” lends itself to talking about “leaders” who are at the front of such “movements,” guiding the direction and flow of the faceless rankand-file participants who follow in their wake. Networks, on the other hand, are not constituted by leaders and followers but by distinct and ANDREW HOYT

The following articles were presented at the NAASN conference held in March of 2015. NAASN is an acronym for the North American Anarchist Studies Network, an informal association of scholars interested in what has broadly been labeled “anarchist studies.” Inspired by the Anarchist Studies Network (ASN) based in the British Isles, NAASN seeks to bring together people to share their work at an annual gathering somewhere in the geographical area currently called North America. NAASN also functions year-round as a mutual aid system for researchers and writers. NAASN never charges any fees and is purely user controlled. For the last six years, ad hoc, autonomous, and self-motivated organizing committees have formed to host each conference. These organizing committees release the call for papers and accept all submissions. These groups are also responsible for finding the space for the event and putting together the conference guide, which organizes the submissions into panels and schedules them. During the actual conference, they are the ones who, along with a few spontaneous volunteers, make sure everything runs as smoothly as possible. For NAASN 2015, I had the pleasure of taking part in the five-person organizing committee. Having recently moved to the Bay Area I felt very lucky for the opportunity to help host such a gathering of radical scholars. Other members of our little group

Some historical processes leave multitudinous records of their passing: the histories of conquerors and the machinations of bureaucratic state apparatus are preserved in archives just as battles leave landscapes pockmarked by cannon fire and wars leave deep scars on the cultures involved. However, contemporaneous with all these “history making” events, are more obscure realities — realities hidden either intentionally by the actors involved or by competing groups who have succeeded at dominating the spotlight of historical memory. This process of erasure is particularly evident when one tries to research Individuals and groups actively opposed to dominant forces. Researchers who wish to investigate these alternative histories must be aware of the role that the “archive” plays in creating the very vocabulary through which we tell our supposedly objective stories about the past.

R ecent innovations in digital humanities research tools have encouraged historians of radical social movements to employ theoretical approaches of network analysis that were originally pioneered by scholars in the quantitative sciences. These methodologies offer exciting new ways of organizing data and understanding the interconnection of people, ideas, and spaces. However, network analysis can provide the historian with much more than a way to turn social relationships into sophisticated digital maps. Indeed, network theory offers analytically rich vocabularies that can reshape the very way we think about informal and horizontally organized historical phenomenon. For example, anti-authoritarian radicals have often been labeled using the prevailing vertical vocabulary of institutional labor studies. This language implies a rigid social hierarchy that fails to meaningfully describe the complex, egalitarian relationship between participants in these grass-roots struggles. The metaphoric sense of motion implied in the term “social movement” lends itself to talking about “leaders” who are at the front of such “movements,” guiding the direction and flow of the faceless rankand-file participants who follow in their wake. Networks, on the other hand, are not constituted by leaders and followers but by distinct and ANDREW HOYT

This paper traces an incomplete map of the New England-based Galleanisti branch of the Italian sovversivi, in the year 1913. Ideally, many network-maps, sketched in the manner I describe below, can be drawn, linked and analyzed over time. When these cartographies of subversion are placed into a temporal framework they will function like the slides of a flipbook, providing a mechanism for illustrating and explaining change over time; eventually allowing the image of the sovversivi community to move and react to external forces such as government oppression, like an organism reacting to environmental pressures. Such a chronological display of network diagrams would help scholars to see how the sovversivi responded to moments of crisis, conflict, deportations, the banning of periodicals and the imprisonment of propagandists.
This approach highlights a number of different types of weak and strong bonds, from informal businesslike collaborations to deeply personal and long-lasting friendships that knit sovversivi into a community and helps demonstrate how the network circulated nutrients, such as food to hungry strikers and money to legal defense funds. As the network is mapped and then historiographically contextualized, future scholars should be able to better analyze the way various bonds functioned and supported the community. Thus, this work will speak to not only researchers interested in anarchists, the Galleanisti or the sovversivi but to readers interested in how networks, in general, sustain and define themselves over time and in the face of frightful and overwhelming odds.

Recent innovations in digital humanities research tools have encouraged historians of radical social movements to employ theoretical approaches of network analysis that were originally pioneered by scholars in the quantitative sciences. These methodologies offer exciting new ways of organizing data and understanding the interconnection of people, ideas, and spaces. However, network analysis can provide the historian with much more than a way to turn social relationships into sophisticated digital maps. Indeed, network theory offers analytically rich vocabularies that can reshape the very way we think about informal and horizontally organized historical phenomenon. For example, anti-authoritarian radicals have often been labeled using the prevailing vertical vocabulary of institutional labor studies. This language implies a rigid social hierarchy that fails to meaningfully describe the complex, egalitarian relationship between participants in these grass-roots struggles. The metaphoric sense of motion implied in the terms "social movement" lends itself to talking about "leaders" who are at the front of such "movements," guiding the direction and flow of the faceless rank-and-file participants who follow in their wake. Networks, on the overhand, are not constituted by leaders and followers but by distinct and often horizontal "network elements" with specific characteristics. To illustrate the usefulness of network analysis in studies of radicalism this paper examines the lives of Luigi Galleani and Carlo Abate. Galleani and Abate were part of an anarchist publishing collective started in Barre, Vermont by Italian immigrants; this collective published the newspaper Cronaca Sovversiva (Subversive Chronicle) from 1903 to 1920.  Galleani was the newspaper's primary editor and Abate was the primary artist.  Galleani and Abate are usually understood as of unequal historical importance—a charismatic leader and a follower. I argue that network vocabulary is capable of meaningfully expressing the difference between both figures in terms of the roles they played in the network without arranging them into the kinds of hierarchies that institutional organizations—but not anarchist networks—tended to produce.

The Italian language anarchist periodical Cronaca Sovversiva (1903-1919), circulated throughout the Atlantic world and played a vital role in the construction of a transnational social movement across the widespread Italian emigrant labor diaspora. The artistic choices of the newspaper’s primary printmaker, Carlo Abate, were important in creating a revolutionary hagiography that supported the propaganda tactics of the newspaper’s editor, Luigi Galleani. Abate’s wood engravings are involved in larger debates about the presence of the human hand in print-art. In a manner consistent with the artisanal working-class values of Italian anarchists and through the use of lines, shading, and composition, Abate’s visual rhetoric stressed the hand of the artist and thus the labor of production. It provides a noteworthy example of how the transnational circulation of anarchist print culture contributed simultaneously to the formation of a diasporic revolutionary identity and to debates about the role of the artist in an age of mechanical reproduction.

This paper traces the provenance of a single Italian-language anarchist pamphlet, entitled La Responsabilita’ e la Solidarieta’ nella Lotta Operaia (Responsibility and Solidarity in the Worker’s Struggle), from its 1913 printing in Barre, Vermont to its 2009 entry into the Anarchist Archive curated by Dana Ward at Pitzer College, in California.  My goal is to examine a piece of material/print culture and also suggest pitfalls we as historians and archivists face in our attempt to preserve and analyze secretive and maligned social movements such as the anarchists.  This project is meant to not only contribute to our historical knowledge of anarchist propaganda networks and the consumption of radical print culture but also to speak to the power of archives and the difficulties that surround the digitization of primary source material.

This dissertation tells the story of how a small group of low-profile militants, located on the periphery of industrial America, set in motion a chain of events that led Luigi Galleani to become one of the most notorious Italian anarchist and resulted in the Cronaca Sovversiva (1903-1919) becoming the most infamous “anarchist rag” ever published in North America. To counter the erasure of anarchists from the social history of the immigrant working-class (and to describe members of the Cronaca network beyond Galleani), this dissertation conducts extensive analysis of a single journal but avoids its ideological content. Instead, I focus my investigation on the newspaper’s financial data (including over 70,000 lines of subscription information) and on over 700 “notes” published under the Cronaca Locale heading (which documented events and conflicts in the town of Barre). A focus on these two sources has allowed me to map the flow of money through the larger Cronaca network and to rebuild a calendar of the Barre anarchists’ social life; thereby facilitating a materially specific telling of a story of the Cronaca’s rise to prominence and the process by which the journal’s network spread and simultaneously narrowed—reaching a position of importance within a transnational movement while also walling itself off from that larger movement by becoming inseparably linked with the polarizing and larger-than-life personality of Galleani. It is a tale of social relations more than of ideas or ideology; its goal is to explain how a small sub-network within the anarchist movement became increasingly radical and turned away from mass-organizing, thereby setting the stage for the better-known history of the so-called “Galleanisti” as anarchism’s most divisive faction.