The infamous trial and execution of two Boston Italian immigrants, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, would be written about in newspapers, books, and court documents for years to come.

The two were convicted of a 1920 armed robbery of a South Braintree shoe factory, which left two dead. But the talk for years later was that the two men - targeted because of their association to an Italian anarchist group - had been innocent. The two were executed at Charlestown State Prison in 1927 by electrocution, and their ashes rest in a vault in the Boston Public Library.

In 1928, Upton Sinclair wrote a book on the trial titled Boston, which asserted that Sacco and Vanzetti were innocent. The book was banned by the New England Watch and Ward Society, however the controversy surrounding the ban later led to the changes in the state's obscenity laws.