Author Mary Beth Basile Chopas to Give Talk at Concord Library

CONCORD – Author Mary Elizabeth Basile Chopas will discuss her book Searching for Subversives: the story of Italian Internment in Wartime America at the Concord Free Public Library, 129 Main Street, on Thursday, March 1st at 7 p.m.

When the United States entered World War II, Italian nationals living in this country were declared enemy aliens and faced with legal restrictions. Several thousand aliens and a few U.S. citizens were arrested and underwent flawed hearings, and hundreds were interned. Shedding new light on an injustice often overshadowed by the mass confinement of Japanese Americans, Mary Elizabeth Basile Chopas traces how government and military leaders constructed wartime policies affecting Italian residents. Based on new archival research into the alien enemy hearings, this in-depth legal analysis illuminates a process not widely understood. From presumptive guilt in the arrest and internment based on membership in social and political organizations, to hurdles in attaining American citizenship, Chopas uncovers many layers of repression not heretofore revealed in scholarship about the World War II home front.

Mary Elizabeth Basile Chopas has been an adjunct professor of law at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Please register at https://concordlibrary.org/news-events/events-calendar/ or call (978) 318-3365.

(Photo by Lili Englehardt Photography)