Italian American Family Research Articles

Sympathetic Neurocirculatory Failure in Parkinson Disease: Evidence for an Etiologic Role of α-Synuclein

Letters4 December 2001Sympathetic Neurocirculatory Failure in Parkinson Disease: Evidence for an Etiologic Role of α-SynucleinDavid S. Goldstein, MD, PhD, Sheng-Ting Li, MD, and Irwin J. Kopin, MDDavid S. Goldstein, MD, PhDNational Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke; Bethesda, MD 20892-1620Search for more papers by this author, Sheng-Ting Li, MDNational Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke; Bethesda, MD 20892-1620Search for more papers by this author, and Irwin J. Kopin, MDNational Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke; Bethesda, MD 20892-1620Search for more papers by this authorAuthor, Article, and Disclosure Informationhttps://doi.org/10.7326/0003-4819-135-11-200112040-00026 SectionsAboutFull TextPDF ToolsAdd to favoritesDownload CitationsTrack CitationsPermissions ShareFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail TO THE EDITOR:In Parkinson disease, orthostatic hypotension reflects sympathetic neurocirculatory failure, characterized by cardiac sympathetic denervation (1). An Italian-American family has been shown to carry a mutation of the α-synuclein gene, with autosomal dominant transmission of Parkinson disease (2). We report neurogenic orthostatic hypotension and cardiac sympathetic denervation in an affected family member. Physical examination showed pill-roll tremor, bradykinesia, and cogwheel rigidity that improved with L-dopa–carbidopa. The patient had reproducible orthostatic hypotension without tachycardia. Speech and gait were approximately normal. Beat-to-beat blood pressure responses to the Valsalva maneuver indicated sympathetic neurocirculatory failure (3). The concentration of norepinephrine in antecubital ...

Consideration of Cultural and Relational Issues in Bereavement: The Case of an Italian American Family

Recently, the literature on loss and grieving has begun to acknowledge the need to consider both individual and family processes involved in grieving, as well as the social and cultural context within which grieving occurs. The present article provides a discussion of the multiple dimensions of the grieving process. Using an example of an Italian American family, it also shows how to assist bereaved families as they cope with loss in the context of individual, familial, and social/cultural influences.

Home front soldier: the story of a GI and his Italian American family during World War II

Home front soldier: the story of a GI and his Italian American family during World War II

Migration-Related Resources on the World Wide Web

Angel Island: Life in Detainment . Often called the Pacific Gateway or the Island of the West, Angel Island was a stopping point for the majority of Asians who immi grated to the United States. The International Channel maintains this site, focusing on immigrants' experiences while detained at Angel Island. Separate pages address living conditions, medical examinations, and interrogation, while another investigates the poetry some immigrants carved into the walls of the facility. Angel Island: Stories, Photography, and Poetry: . This web site, sponsored by the Angel Island Immigration Station Foundation, offers a look into the history of the island and into the experiences of those who traveled through it. It addresses such issues as the Open Door Policy, the Coolie trade, Asian railroad workers, and the virulent racism many Asian immigrants faced. Arduini and Pizzo: An Italian-American Family History: . A family's decision to rediscover its roots becomes an educational opportunity for all. Created by Frank Arduini in 1994, this site records the histories of the Arduini and Pizzo families?two Italian immigrant clans joined in marriage in 1947. Arduini includes over thirty stories and eighty photographs on his pages, offering a very personal view of what it is like to build lives and legacies in a new country. Ellis Island Photography, 19004920: . Part of the Keystone-Mast Collection of the California Museum of Photography, this site contains numerous photos taken at Ellis Island during the great waves of immigration in the early twentieth century. The collection includes images of the structure and makeup of the Ellis Island facility, as well as photos of immigrants undergoing various examinations and questioning. This site provides an excellent resource for jump-starting discussions on the immigrant experience. Immigrant Ship Transcribers Guild: . Founded only a year ago, the Immigrant Ship Tran scribers Guild (ISTG) now has over five hundred volunteer members who translate, decipher, and transcribe the passenger lists of immi grant ships to the United States. Currently available online are the lists for nearly two thousand ships dating back as far as the mid 1600s. Teachers and students can easily navigate and search the site for names, dates, ports of departure, or ports of arrival. Learning About Immigration Through Oral History: . This lesson plan, part of the Library of Congress American Memory Collection, uses the oral histories of contemporary immigrants in east central Illinois to teach students the process of historiography and give them an understanding of our nation's ethnic diversity. The plan uses selections from the American Memory online collection as well as print and video resources. The lesson can be geared toward high school or middle school classes, spans several curricular areas, and can comprise either a short unit or a semester-long study. Learning, and Earning, Their Stripes: . The text of this site originally appeared in the Washington Post in 1996. It includes an article describing the controversial process of U.S. citizenship testing and a list of one hundred questions that the Immigration and Naturalization Service gives prospective citizens to prepare for their naturalization exam. Having students take the test provides an nice introduction to issues of citizenship and immigration.

Book Review: The Italian American Family Album

Book Review: The Italian American Family Album

The Italian American Family Album.

An Italian immigrant says, came to America because I heard the streets were paved with gold. When I got here, I found out three things: first, the streets weren't paved with gold; second, they weren't paved at all; and third, I was expected to pave them. Against all odds-a new language, new customs, and the ethnic slurs and catcalls of prejudice-Italian Americans paved the streets, rolled the cigars, sewed the clothes, cooked the meals, and did all manner of back-breaking work to build a new life in Lamerica, the land of success. The Italian American Family Album brings us into the heart of those immigrants' experiences. Through diaries, letters, interviews, and articles from magazines and newspapers we share the ordeals and the triumphs of the Italian American first setting foot on his new homeland. These personal accounts and family photographs of scores of Italian American families tell inspiring and courageous stories of hardship and suffering. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, the journey across the Atlantic was remembered by many as the via dolorosa, the sorrowful way. And even after arriving in the new homeland and successfully getting through immigration, finding a job and a place to live, and learning new ways of doing almost everything was a challenge. But there was joy in the new country, as well. The new arrivals were embraced by a community of fellow Italians with a grand sense of humor, an intense appreciation of music, and an even greater appreciation of good food. Life for the newcomer was full of old traditions and pleasure, and we hear first-hand how the old ways endured even as new philosophies and customs were embraced daily. Through the stories of the children of those early immigrants-writers Gay Talese and John Ciardi, entertainers like Tony Bennett, baseball great Yogi Berra, and others not famous, but still proud to call themselves Italian Americans-we see how family pride and strong ties to the old country survive even today. As Governor Mario Cuomo says in his introduction: have always been intensely proud that I am the son of Italian immigrants and that my Italian heritage helped make me the man I am. That pride and the unique experiences of the early Italian Americans are an integral part of our country's history. Through the memories and photographs from the albums of generations of Italian families we meet real people, cut of the same cloth as we are-a many-colored and multi-textured cloth of ethnic customs, languages, traditions, and memories. We are a nation of immigrants, and The Italian American Family Album belongs to each of us.

Italian and Irish filmmakers in America: Ford, Capra, Coppola, and Scorsese

Acknowledgments Introduction: The Design of the Book 1. Irish and Italian Immigrants and the Movies Framing Ethnic Culture Filming Ethnicity Piecemeal: D. W. Griffith's Women and Other Precedents 2. Irish and Italian Immigrant Stereotypes in the 1920s Irish America Pays a Price for Success Immigrant Italians for Anglo-American Audiences 3. John Ford and the Landscapes of Irish America An Irish-American Idea of Film Production Urban Irish America: Ethnic Dangers and Virtues Ireland Remembered: The Holy Mother, Judas, and Mary Magdalene Faraway Places with Irish Types The Wild West: Irish Identity as American History 4. Frank Capra and His Italian Vision of America The Italian Success Ethic in Capra's Films The Early Years: Irish Types and WASP Woman The Mature Years: Italian Social Ethics in Anglo America The Follow-Through: An All-American Ethnic Story 5. Francis Coppola and Ethnic Double Vision Growing up with the Success Ethic From Angry Irish Son to Italian-American Mother Facing the Self-Destructive Successful Father The Flight from Italian/American Patriarchy 6. Martin Scorsese in Little Italy and Greater Manhattan Boyhood in Little Italy The Italian-American Family on Set Doing Penance in the Streets Outside Little Italy with an Italian-American Conscience List of Films Selected Bibliography Index

The Fault of Memory

Conflict in immigrant communities between parents and children over the right way to live is cast in the idioms of geography. Immigrants tell their children stories about the place they left as a display of their deepest values and understanding of the world. This article explores the nature of this interaction in New York's largest Italian community, Italian Harlem, during a period of significant intergenerational tension. Most scholars of Italian America have suggested that the younger generation turned away from the traditions of their parents in favor of American styles and values. The article challenges this notion of tradition, maintaining instead that the articulation of a “tradition” is a complex cultural process which does not discover, but creates, the past in response to the needs and dilemmas of the present. “Southern Italy” was presented to younger Italian-Americans in such a way as to exclude them. An understanding of this often bitter intergenerational tension must be integrated into histories of the Italian-American family.

THE FAULT OF MEMORY: "Southern Italy" in the Imagination of Immigrants and the Lives of Their Children in Italian Harlem, 1920-1945

Conflict in immigrant communities between parents and children over the right way to live is cast in the idioms of geography. Immigrants tell their children stories about the place they left as a display of their deepest values and understanding of the world. This article explores the nature of this interaction in New York's largest Italian community, Italian Harlem, during a period of significant intergenerational tension. Most scholars of Italian America have suggested that the younger generation turned away from the traditions of their parents in favor of American styles and values. The article challenges this notion of tradition, maintaining instead that the articulation of a "tradition" is a complex cultural process which does not discover, but creates, the past in response to the needs and dilemmas of the present. "Southern Italy" was presented to younger Italian-Americans in such a way as to exclude them. An understanding of this often bitter intergenerational tension must be integrated into histories of the Italian-American family.

Critique [of Reclaiming the Subject: Italian Women Self-Defined by Chris Ruggiero

Ruggiero9s stated purpose is “… to expose … the mythology which surrounds the image of Italian American women …” through studies of Italian American women and the Italian American family in a “feminist framework.” These new studies would offer “feminist method and content” and new, unconventional methodologies would provide a “female corrective” to the “masculinist bias [found in] traditional ethnic studies scholarship.” Ruggiero9s motives are laudable, but she fails to clarify either the “masculinist,” “sex-typed” view point she criticizes or the new “feminist” methodology she advocates. A “selected review” of “traditional literature” she offers by way of explanation becomes a rostrum for condemnation of the “masculinist” motives, methods, and conclusions in the works considered (by R. Gambino, H. Gans, B. B. Caroli, C. Mindel and R. W. Habenstein, and others).

Intrafamilial cluster of hepatitis B virus infection: study of a large family in the United States.

Seventy-eight persons in an Italian-American family were tested for hepatitis B serologic markers. Fifty-one (65%) had serologic evidence of active or prior hepatitis B infection. Twenty-eight (36%) had evidence of active infection, including twenty-six with hepatitis B surface antigen (HBsAg), and two with antibody to the hepatitis B core antigen only. Severe chronic liver disease was documented in four family members, three of whom had serologic evidence of active hepatitis B infection and the fourth died before the availability of hepatitis B testing. Thirteen of 18 (72%) offspring of six HBsAg positive mothers were HBsAg positive. No epidemiologic explanation of the high prevalence of hepatitis B infection in this family was found, although mother-to-child transmission in years past is a possible explanation.

The Italian-American Family: Assimilation and Change, 1900-1965

The Italian-American Family: Assimilation and Change, 1900-1965

Hemoglobin JOxford: Effects on Hemoglobin and Erythrocyte Function

Abstract Hemoglobin JOxford (α215 gly→asp β2A) was found to constitute 20 per cent of the hemoglobin in eight members of an Italian-American family. In the heterozygous state, no clinical stigmata referable to the variant Hb were found. Erythrocyte morphology and survival were normal. No evidence of Hb instability was found. Oxygen-affinity studies of whole blood, whole hemolysates and isolated Hb JOxford were normal. A brief review of the literature on J hemoglobins is included.

Acrokeratosis Verruciformis (Hopf)

In 1947 Niedelman 1 described an Italian-American family in which acrokeratosis verruciformis (Hopf) occurred in 14 members in 4 generations. The inheritance followed a dominant pattern. Van den Bosch 2 has recently suggested that the condition is an X-linked dominant rather than an autosomal dominant. The suggestion was based on the facts that females are about twice as frequently affected as males and that no certain instance of male-to-male transmission has been reported. Assuming complete penetrance, the condition if X-linked, should, furthermore, affect all daughters of an affected male. Van den Bosch was prompted to analyze the reported pedigrees by his own observations 3 of a complex, apparently X-linked trait in which acrokeratosis verruciformis is one component. Follow-up of the family reported in 1947 seemed indicated, in order to corroborate the