American gangsters in the twentieth century: this class hopes to suggest larger interpretive guidelines for better understanding the epoch. America’s gangsters are best understood not as an aberration, but as an integral part of American history. The twentieth century was a time of intense conflict and millennial expectations, and Italians were at the very heart of mobsters, rum-runners and ‘tough guys.’ Gangsters were not as powerful in the 1920s as is often assumed, nor was law enforcement as much on the defensive. The insurgent political and social movements of the last century–including immigrant unrest and governmental power, Prohibition, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and gambling–drew from even as they sought to transform values and beliefs deeply rooted in American political culture. Students will take from this course some sense of how gangsters served for many Americans as fact and fiction, regarding United States history in the last century.