New book by UW lecturer examines legacy of activist incident

Growing up in Catonsville, Maryland, a suburb of Baltimore, Shawn Peters can't remember the first time he heard about the Catonsville Nine. He was 18 months old in May 1968, when nine people — including two brothers, both well-known activists and Catholic priests, and a former nun — removed hundreds of files from the local draft office and burned them with homemade napalm. Peters heard a variety of stories about the incident: some straightforward accounts, others more fanciful, told by people who claimed to have been somehow involved. A popular play, and later a movie made by Gregory Peck, was created from more than 1,000 pages of court transcripts, shaping the historical memory of a generation. But Peters also saw the ambiguity — in both the causes and the effects — of these actions. "I've known since I was 15 years old that I wanted to write a book about this," says Peters, now an instructor in the Integrated Liberal Studies (ILS) program and coordinator of teaching and learning for the Center for Educational Opportunity (CEO) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. "To me, it was an interesting story because it was kind of confusing and contradictory." Peters' new book, "The Catonsville Nine: A Story of Faith and Resistance in the Vietnam Era," published by Oxford University Press , provides a more complete picture of this incident than had previously existed.