They came from the poorest parts of Ireland and Italy, and met as rivals on the sidewalks of New York. In the nineteenth century and for long after, the Irish and Italians fought in the Catholic Church, on the waterfront, at construction sites, and in the streets. Then they made peace through romance, marrying each other on a large scale in the years after World War II. An Unlikely Union unfolds the dramatic story of how two of America's largest ethnic groups learned to love and laugh with each other in the wake of decades of animosity. The vibrant cast of characters features saints such as
Millions of immigrants were drawn to American shores, not by the mythic streets paved with gold, but rather by its tables heaped with food. How they experienced the realities of America’s abundant food—its meat and white bread, its butter and cheese, fruits and vegetables, coffee and beer—reflected their earlier deprivations and shaped their ethnic practices in the new land. Hungering for America tells the stories of three distinctive groups and their unique culinary dramas. Italian immigrants transformed the food of their upper classes and of sacred days into a generic “Italian” food that inspired community pride and cohesion. Irish immigrants, in contrast, loath to mimic the foodways of the Protestant British elite, diminished food as a marker of ethnicity. And East European Jews, who venerated food as the vital center around which family and religious practice gathered, found that dietary restrictions jarred with America’s boundless choices. These tales, of immigrants in their old worlds and in the new, demonstrate the role of hunger in driving migration and the significance of food in cementing ethnic identity and community. Hasia Diner confirms the well-worn adage, “Tell me what you eat and I will tell you what you are.”
This book addresses both the dissemination and increased understanding of the specificity of Irish literature in Italy during the first half of the twentieth century. This period was a crucial time of nation-building for both countries. Antonio Bibbò illustrates the various images of Ireland that circulated in Italy, focusing on political and cultural discourses and examines the laborious formation of an Irish literary canon in Italy. The center of this analysis relies on books and articles on Irish politics, culture, and literature produced in Italy, including pamplets, anthologies, literary histories, and propaganda; translations of texts by Irish writers; and archival material produced by writers, publishers, and cultural and political institutions. Bibbò argues that the construction of different and often conflicting ideas of Ireland in Italy as well as the wavering understanding of the distinctiveness of Irish culture, substantially affected the Italian responses to Irish writers and their presence within the Italian publishing field. This book contributes to the discussion on transnational aspects of canon formation, reception studies, and Italian cultural studies.
'...from time to time a study comes along that truly can be called ‘path breaking,’ ‘seminal,’ ‘essential,’ a ‘must read.’ How the Irish Became White is such a study.' John Bracey, W.E.B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies, University of Massachussetts, Amherst The Irish came to America in the eighteenth century, fleeing a homeland under foreign occupation and a caste system that regarded them as the lowest form of humanity. In the new country – a land of opportunity – they found a very different form of social hierarchy, one that was based on the color of a person’s skin. Noel Ignatiev’s 1995 book – the first published work of one of America’s leading and most controversial historians – tells the story of how the oppressed became the oppressors; how the new Irish immigrants achieved acceptance among an initially hostile population only by proving that they could be more brutal in their oppression of African Americans than the nativists. This is the story of How the Irish Became White.
This dazzling collection of original essays from some of the country's leading thinkers asks the rather intriguing question - Are Italians White? Each piece carefully explores how, when and why whiteness became important to Italian Americans, and the significance of gender, class and nation to racial identity.
A sample of nearly 12,000 Irish, Italians, Jews, Blacks, and non-immigrants from Providence, Rhode Island provides the material for assessment of variations in educational patterns and economic success.
In the newest volume in the award-winning Penguin History of American Life series, James R. Barrett chronicles how a new urban American identity was forged in the streets, saloons, churches, and workplaces of the American city. This process of "Americanization from the bottom up" was deeply shaped, Barrett argues, by the Irish. From Lower Manhattan to the South Side of Chicago to Boston's North End, newer waves of immigrants and African Americans found it nearly impossible to avoid the Irish. While historians have emphasized the role of settlement houses and other mainstream institutions in Americanizing immigrants, Barrett makes the original case that the culture absorbed by newcomers upon reaching American shores had a distinctly Hibernian cast. By 1900, there were more people of Irish descent in New York City than in Dublin; more in the United States than in all of Ireland. But in the late nineteenth century, the sources of immigration began to shift, to southern and eastern Europe and beyond. Whether these newcomers wanted to save their souls, get a drink, find a job, or just take a stroll in the neighborhood, they had to deal with Irish Americans. Barrett reveals how the Irish vacillated between a progressive and idealistic impulse toward their fellow immigrants and a parochial defensiveness stemming from the hostility earlier generations had faced upon their own arrival in America. They imparted racist attitudes toward African Americans; they established ethnic "deadlines" across city neighborhoods; they drove other immigrants from docks, factories, and labor unions. Yet the social teachings of the Catholic Church, a sense of solidarity with the oppressed, and dark memories of poverty and violence in both Ireland and America ushered in a wave of progressive political activism that eventually embraced other immigrants. Drawing on contemporary sociological studies and diaries, newspaper accounts, and Irish American literature, The Irish Way illustrates how the interactions between the Irish and later immigrants on the streets, on the vaudeville stage, in Catholic churches, and in workplaces helped forge a multi-ethnic American identity that has a profound legacy in the USA today.
Follows the Irish from their first arrival in the American colonies through the bleak days of the potato famine, the decades of ethnic prejudice and nativist discrimination, the rise of Irish political power, and on to the historic moment when John F. Kennedy was elected to the highest office in the land.
Although the United States has always portrayed itself as a sanctuary for the world's victim's of poverty and oppression, anti-immigrant movements have enjoyed remarkable success throughout American history. None attained greater prominence than the Order of the Star Spangled Banner, a fraternal order referred to most commonly as the Know Nothing party. Vowing to reduce the political influence of immigrants and Catholics, the Know Nothings burst onto the American political scene in 1854, and by the end of the following year they had elected eight governors, more than one hundred congressmen, and thousands of other local officials including the mayors of Boston, Philadelphia, San Francisco, and Chicago. After their initial successes, the Know Nothings attempted to increase their appeal by converting their network of lodges into a conventional political organization, which they christened the "American Party." Recently, historians have pointed to the Know Nothings' success as evidence that ethnic and religious issues mattered more to nineteenth-century voters than better-known national issues such as slavery. In this important book, however, Anbinder argues that the Know Nothings' phenomenal success was inextricably linked to the firm stance their northern members took against the extension of slavery. Most Know Nothings, he asserts, saw slavery and Catholicism as interconnected evils that should be fought in tandem. Although the Know Nothings certainly were bigots, their party provided an early outlet for the anti-slavery sentiment that eventually led to the Civil War. Anbinder's study presents the first comprehensive history of America's most successful anti-immigrant movement, as well as a major reinterpretation of the political crisis that led to the Civil War.
