Italian-American Community Research Articles

Roseto effect: An Italian-American version of the French paradox?

Clinicians worldwide continually have to respond to questions about the potential benefits on health from the moderate consumption of alcohol, and the “French paradox” has often been cited as supporting this premise. We wish to briefly comment on findings from the last several decades that provide evidence that moderate drinking may have some beneficial health effects, starting with a new analysis of the observation of “Unusually Low Incidence of Death From Myocardial Infarction” – a study of an Italian American community in Pennsylvania published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 1964.

Edward Corsi's La Settimana: Italianità as a guiding principle of progress in a new land

This article explores how the Italian American bilingual weekly La Settimana, which ran from December 1935 to November 1937, represented an excellent platform not only to promote the extraordinary achievements of Italians in America, but also to educate its wide readership about the need to be more united, more focused in their aims, and more respectful and understanding of the values of culture. This article examines the weekly in light of the belief advocated by its founder, Edward Corsi, that the Italian American communities needed a much higher quality of journalism that reflected and followed the progress of the Italians in America, particularly those of the second and third generations, and to stimulate their interest in American life and its institutions, while stressing the importance of their Italian heritage and language. The essay also addresses La Settimana's benevolent attitude toward Mussolini and his leadership within the context of the weekly's promotion of italianità.

EEthnicity: Social media, Italian Americans, and Cultural Identity

This study seeks to determine the relationship between social media and various generations of the Italian American community. It also aims to understand if various types of social media posts affect Italian Americans differently depending on their age. Presenting social media as a new host culture for Italian Americans where their ethnic identity serves as their primary point of reference as they navigate the digital world, this study also attempts to determine exactly how effective social media can be seen as a tool for discovering and learning more about one’s ethnic heritage. This study was performed via a quantitative survey of 110 respondents, with certain results analyzed via both chi-square tests of independence and Pearson correlation coefficients. Study outcomes assert that an individual’s self-concept is built on cultural, social, and personal identities, with all three working together to form a person’s overall identity. Survey respondents showed a strong cultural tie to their Italian American heritage that affected their personal identity to the point where they felt it was necessary to seek out Italian American-related content on social media. By participating in Italian American social media sites as either a fan or consumer of content, the respondents showed a social identity in which their cultural and personal identities play a defining role. The respondents’ cultural identity was used as the social context within which they operate, showing that it does influence how they interact with social media content.

“Time Meant Nothing”: A New Reading of Pietro di Donato's Three Circles of Light beyond Autobiography and Stereotypes

“Time Meant Nothing”: A New Reading of Pietro di Donato's <i>Three Circles of Light</i> beyond Autobiography and Stereotypes

Percorsi di un italiano all'estero: Robert Viscusi Replies to Rosemary Serra

<i>Percorsi di un italiano all'estero</i>: Robert Viscusi Replies to Rosemary Serra

Becoming Italian

Becoming Italian

Italian Politics and Culture from Fascism to Postwar Democracy in the Life and Work of Uguccione Ranieri di Sorbello (1906–1969)

Italian Politics and Culture from Fascism to Postwar Democracy in the Life and Work of Uguccione Ranieri di Sorbello (1906–1969)

Remembering Italian America: Memory, Migration, Identity

Remembering Italian America: Memory, Migration, Identity

White Ethnicity in the Urban Crisis: Newark’s Italian Americans

Abstract Scholars have largely understood the urban crisis, including racial violence, as a matter of Black versus white, with white ethnics in possession of a largely inconsequential ethnicity. An examination of two community leaders from Newark’s North Ward reveals competing Italian American perceptions of the urban crisis. Anthony Imperiale, the race-baiting demagogue and politician, has been portrayed by the media and by scholars as the lone voice of the North Ward. Stephen Adubato argued that urban white working-class ethnics like Italian American Newarkers were reacting to economic hardship at a time when they believed the government was advantaging African Americans. Rather than foster a white identity and anti-black sentiment, Adubato aimed to promote stronger Italian American ethnicity as a basis for making claims on resources. A consideration of the two men, using newspaper accounts and archival sources, illustrates that Newark’s Italian Americans as a distinct ethnic group had diverse if at times overlapping interpretations of their experience of the urban crisis rooted in identification by race on the one hand and ethnicity on the other. The attitudes toward and relations with African Americans represented by both men were grounded in real and imagined socioeconomic, political, and cultural realms within the specific racial context of the era and the challenges of the urban crisis which extended to the Italian American community.

Solidarietà Sotto la Terra: Italian American Community Building and Ethnic Strife in the 1913-14 Copper Country Strike

The 1913-14 Copper Country Strike was one of the most tragic labor strikes of the twentieth century but remains largely ignored by mainstream historical research. This article analyzes the importance of ethnic strife as a central factor in the strike using the Italian community as a case study. The Italian community alongside the other Eastern and Southern European immigrant communities proved essential for empowering and organizing immigrant laborers to confront capital and reconcile ethnic tensions with Western European immigrant communities during the 1913-14 strike.

La colonna della discordia. Il Balbo Monument di Chicago tra propaganda e memoria

The column offered by Mussolini to the city of Chicago in memory of Italo Balbo’s trans­oceanic flight symbolized the Fascist attempt to penetrate American society. Over the years, the monument has become a symbol of identity for the Italian-American community of the city. The article traces the history of the Balbo Monument from its origins to the recent protest for its removal, questioning the significance of its conservation to date.

Malleable monuments and comparative cultural property law: The Balbo monument between the United States and Italy

Abstract Still standing in situ today, the Balbo monument in Chicago has presented an especially monumental challenge for the Chicago community, including members of the Italian American community in Chicago. This article considers the laws which regulate cultural heritage in the separate territories of Italy and the United States, cultural property law and historic preservation law, respectively, in light of archival research on the behind-the-scenes maneuvers of the Balbo monument’s installation. In certain circumstances, historic property is not the same as cultural property, even though historic property and cultural property may at times overlap. Identity may more greatly inform one category over another through the law’s terminology, connections to place, and resulting historical connections. The central proposal of this article is that some monuments, as they are defined with reference to history under the law, seem so specific to certain histories and historical narratives that they might be meant to be, perhaps counterintuitively, malleable monuments. Despite their characterization as historic property or cultural property, malleable monuments should, can, and, at times, already do, proverbially bend to our shifting and evolving notions of identity as they are inevitably tied to our histories. In Italy, “malleable” may mean tangible monuments with changing symbolism and cultural significance; in the United States, “malleable” may mean embodied symbolism and cultural significance with the impermanence of tangible monuments. Permanence is not definitive of malleable monuments’ existence; rather, impermanence is. Recognizing the complexity of what it means to be Italian in America today through the Balbo monument, the article concludes, may mean accepting the Balbo monument as a malleable monument.

The Italian American Studies Association at Fifty-Five: 1966–2021

The Italian American Studies Association at Fifty-Five: 1966–2021

Blindsided by the American Dream

In her essay “Shades, Color and Internal Dialogues in White America,” from which the present contribution is taken, Maria Lisella takes a savvy streetwise approach to balancing feminism with political consciousness. By sifting through the nuances and politics of her own body language in what appears to be a moment of imminent danger, she takes the long view by educating herself. She achieves this through listening to others’ individual experiences some of which depict white liberals trapped in a web of well-meaning gestures that can endanger them. From the human stories behind racism and prejudice in the Italian American community, she illustrates that dogmatic formulas do not address all situations; understanding among races can only be achieved through direct interaction with each other.

Artistic Philanthropy and Women’s Emancipation in Early Twentieth-Century Italy, in the Life and the Work of Romeyne Robert and Carolina Amari,

Romeyne Robert, married as Ranieri di Sorbello, started an embroidery school in 1904 in Umbria, at the family’s country estate of Pischiello. Her goal was to teach young peasant women to emancipate themselves by learning the craft of embroidery. She was inspired by the Arts and Crafts movement in America and by contemporary programs developed in settlement houses along the East Coast. Their aim was to help the emancipation of immigrant women from Italy by fostering the recovery of artisan skills. At the Sorbello Embroidery School, Romeyne rediscovered the Renaissance technique originally called the punto Umbro, later renamed punto Sorbello. She started the commercial co-operative Arti Decorative Italiane, which aimed to publicize and sell the articles produced both by her school and by other emerging embroidery schools. Romeyne collaborated closely with Carolina Amari, one of the most accomplished textile designers of her time. Carolina Amari was well known in wider circles related to women’s emancipation: she was influential in setting up Industrie Femminili Italiane, in 1904. During her stay in the United States, with the sponsorship of prominent personalities in the Italian American community such as Florence Colgate and Gino Speranza, she set up the Scuola di Industrie Italiane in 1908. A number of pieces from the Sorbello Embroidery School are now held by the Cooper Hewitt Museum, which also holds pieces produced by Arti Decorative Italiane and by Scuola di Industrie Italiane. The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, holds an important sampling of embroideries by Carolina and Francesca Amari. Our paper aims to analyze the main patterns developed by the Sorbello Embroidery School and describe the cultural background that underpinned the movement of artistic philanthropy and women’s emancipation in early twentieth-century Italy. It also focuses on the personalities of pioneer entrepreneurs and textile designers such as Romeyne and Carolina Amari.

Artistic Philanthropy and Women’s Emancipation in Early Twentieth-Century Italy, in the Life and the Work of Romeyne Robert and Carolina Amar

Romeyne Robert, married as Ranieri di Sorbello, started an embroidery school in 1904 in Umbria, at the family’s country estate of Pischiello. Her goal was to teach young peasant women to emancipate themselves by learning the craft of embroidery. She was inspired by the Arts and Crafts movement in America and by contemporary programs developed in settlement houses along the East Coast. Their aim was to help the emancipation of immigrant women from Italy by fostering the recovery of artisan skills. At the Sorbello Embroidery School, Romeyne rediscovered the Renaissance technique originally called the punto Umbro, later renamed punto Sorbello. She started the commercial co-operative Arti Decorative Italiane, which aimed to publicize and sell the articles produced both by her school and by other emerging embroidery schools. Romeyne collaborated closely with Carolina Amari, one of the most accomplished textile designers of her time. Carolina Amari was well known in wider circles related to women’s emancipation: she was influential in setting up Industrie Femminili Italiane, in 1904. During her stay in the United States, with the sponsorship of prominent personalities in the Italian American community such as Florence Colgate and Gino Speranza, she set up the Scuola di Industrie Italiane in 1908. A number of pieces from the Sorbello Embroidery School are now held by the Cooper Hewitt Museum, which also holds pieces produced by Arti Decorative Italiane and by Scuola di Industrie Italiane. The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, holds an important sampling of embroideries by Carolina and Francesca Amari. Our paper aims to analyze the main patterns developed by the Sorbello Embroidery School and describe the cultural background that underpinned the movement of artistic philanthropy and women’s emancipation in early twentieth-century Italy. It also focuses on the personalities of pioneer entrepreneurs and textile designers such as Romeyne and Carolina Amari.

A Tribute to Louise DeSalvo (1942–2018)

A Tribute to Louise DeSalvo (1942–2018)

Prosthetic Memories in &lt;em&gt;The Sopranos&lt;/em&gt;

Prosthetic Memories in &lt;em&gt;The Sopranos&lt;/em&gt;

The Fascist racial turn: the view from the Italian-American community in the United States

ABSTRACTThis article examines Italian-Americans’ reaction to the Fascist embrace of anti-Semitism in 1938, primarily by means of a perusal of the Italian-language press in the U.S. It argues that the newcomers and their offspring usually failed to distance themselves from the regime’s racial turn because of pre-existing rivalries and resentment towards U.S. Jews. It also holds that, although Italian-Americans hardly subscribed to the Fascist ideology, which cannot be confined to anti-Jewish theories only, the notion that the Italian people were a race of their own helped the immigrants and their descendants strengthen a sense of ethnic identity based on their common national extraction and, thus, further allowed for the penetration of anti-Semitic propaganda into the Little Italies.

To Fight for Italy, to Fight for America: For Italians in Connecticut, It Was a Fight for Liberty

Research Article| April 01 2017 To Fight for Italy, to Fight for America: For Italians in Connecticut, It Was a Fight for Liberty Carl Antonucci; Carl Antonucci Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Kenneth DiMaggio Kenneth DiMaggio Kenneth DiMaggio is a Professor of Humanities at Capital Community College in Hartford. He has written and presented several papers in the field of Italian American studies, among them, “Leave the Gun, Take the Cannolis: How Machiavelli’s The Prince Influences the Role of the Gangster in Modern Literature and Film” which was published in the journal, Italian Americana. He and Dr. Carl Antonucci have also written “When Russo Street was Mussolini Street: Revisiting an Apocryphal Chapter in the Italian American Cultural Narrative,” that looks at the Italian American community’s wide support for Mussolini prior to World War II. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Connecticut History Review (2017) 56 (1): 68–87. https://doi.org/10.5406/connhistrevi.56.1.0068 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Carl Antonucci, Kenneth DiMaggio; To Fight for Italy, to Fight for America: For Italians in Connecticut, It Was a Fight for Liberty. Connecticut History Review 1 January 2017; 56 (1): 68–87. doi: https://doi.org/10.5406/connhistrevi.56.1.0068 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveUniversity of Illinois PressConnecticut History Review Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright 2017 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois2017 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.