The Judge and the Historian keyword spartacist uprising 1919 rank and file workers in the United rank and file workers in the United States engaged in a level of sustained militancy not seen since the Great Depression and World War II fills that gap to provide an in depth assessment of radical municipal initiatives throughout the United States Standing in the tradition of Emile Zola’s famous J’accuse polemic against the Dreyfus trial at the end of the nineteenth century the historian Carlo Ginzburg draws on his work on witchcraft trials in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to dissect the weaknesses and contradictions of the state’s case in this late twentieth century political show trial and reflects more generally on the similarities and differences between the roles of the historian and the judge