Reconstructing Italy
Reconstructing Italy

Author: Stephanie Zeier Pilat

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-04-08

Total Pages: 307

ISBN-13: 1317070305

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Reconstructing Italy traces the postwar transformation of the Italian nation through an analysis of the Ina-Casa plan for working class housing, established in 1949 to address the employment and housing crises. Government sponsored housing programs undertaken after WWII have often been criticized as experiments that created more social problems than they solved. The neighborhoods of Ina-Casa stand out in contrast to their contemporaries both in terms of design and outcome. Unlike modernist high-rise housing projects of the period, Ina-Casa neighborhoods are picturesque and human-scaled and incorporate local construction materials and methods resulting in a rich aesthetic diversity. And unlike many other government forays into housing undertaken during this period, the Ina-Casa plan was, on the whole, successful: the neighborhoods are still lively and cohesive communities today. This book examines what made Ina-Casa a success among so many failed housing experiments, focusing on the tenuous balance struck between the legislation governing Ina-Casa, the architects who led the Ina-Casa administration, the theory of design that guided architects working on the plan, and an analysis of the results-the neighborhoods and homes constructed. Drawing on the writings of the architects, government documents, and including brief passages from works of neorealist literature and descriptions of neorealist films by Pier Paolo Pasolini, Italo Calvino and others, this book presents a portrait of the postwar struggle to define a post-Fascist Italy.

Reconstructing Italians in Chicago
Reconstructing Italians in Chicago

Author: Fred L. Gardaphé

Publisher:

Published: 2011-10-05

Total Pages: 376

ISBN-13: 9780983553809

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Reconstructing Italians in Chicago is an Anthology based on presentations given at the May 2008 Conference of the same name at Casa Italia Chicago. It is dedicated the Professor Rudlph Vecoli and it contains works by over thirty authors from different disciplines on the subject of Italians in Chicago.There is something for everybody in this eclectic volume. Every reader will find a topic or a writer that s/he wants to know more about. Publication of Reconstructing Italians in Chicago Compiled and edited by Dominic Candeloro and Fred L.Gardaphe' is a major step toward making Chicago's Italians the best documented (and best understood) in the nation. The writers represented in this Anthology include: Leonard Amari, Michael Antonucci, Tony Ardizzone, Robert Benedetti, Adria Bernardi, Dominic Candeloro, Kathy Catrombone and Ellen Shubart, Paolo Ciminello, Jerry Colangelo, David Cowan and John Kuenster, Bill Dal Cerro, Lisi Cipriani, Peter D'Agostino, Fr. Gino Dalpiaz, Tina DeRosa, Annette Dixon, Chickie Farella, Anthony Fornelli, Fred Gardaphe' Thomas Guglielmo, Billy Lombardo, Calogero Lombardo, Robert Lombardo, Ernesto R Milani, Rose Ann Rabiola Miele, Gloria Nardini, Daniel Niemiec, Gianna Panofsky and Eugene Miller, Peter Pero, Tony Romano, Vince Romano, Judy Santacaterina, Giovanni Schiavo, Anthony Sorrentino, Rudolph Vecoli, and Peter Venturelli.

Chicago Heights
Chicago Heights

Author: Dominic Candeloro

Publisher: Arcadia Publishing

Published: 2004

Total Pages: 164

ISBN-13: 9780738524702

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The history of Chicago Heights mirrors the growth and struggles of the entire nation. From determined settlers to visionary industrialists, from the power of rail to the vast intercontinental highway system, this Illinois city of hard workers and dynamic ethnic groups persevered through overwhelming obstacles to claim its place at the center of the Industrial Revolution.

Hopelessly Alien
Hopelessly Alien

Author: Louis Corsino

Publisher: State University of New York Press

Published: 2024-05-01

Total Pages: 244

ISBN-13: 1438497636

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Hopelessly Alien is an in-depth study of Italian immigration to Chicago Heights, Illinois, between 1910 and 1950. Drawing upon oral histories, interviews, historical documents, and census materials, Louis Corsino examines the critical concept of hope, which most immigration studies have cast in privatized, psychological terms as the motivation to emigrate in search of a better life. This investigation offers a more contentious, sociological perspective, depicting hope as both an ideological lure to recruit and manage the "foreign element" and as a resource immigrants employed to purchase acceptance and avoid a disparaging label as a "hopelessly alien" stranger. These dialectical processes are illustrated through the Italian immigrants' pursuit of occupational mobility and homeownership, and the appropriation of their children's hopes. Each became forms of cultural capital that demonstrated a public commitment to the American ethos of "joyful striving." Each provided measures of success, but these individual pursuits came at the expense of upsetting the necessary tension between individual and communal hopes.

The Routledge History of Italian Americans
The Routledge History of Italian Americans

Author: William Connell

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-09-27

Total Pages: 915

ISBN-13: 1135046700

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The Routledge History of Italian Americans weaves a narrative of the trials and triumphs of one of the nation’s largest ethnic groups. This history, comprising original essays by leading scholars and critics, addresses themes that include the Columbian legacy, immigration, the labor movement, discrimination, anarchism, Fascism, World War II patriotism, assimilation, gender identity and popular culture. This landmark volume offers a clear and accessible overview of work in the growing academic field of Italian American Studies. Rich illustrations bring the story to life, drawing out the aspects of Italian American history and culture that make this ethnic group essential to the American experience.

Organized Crime in Chicago
Organized Crime in Chicago

Author: Robert M. Lombardo

Publisher: University of Illinois Press

Published: 2012-12-30

Total Pages: 291

ISBN-13: 0252094484

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This book provides a comprehensive sociological explanation for the emergence and continuation of organized crime in Chicago. Tracing the roots of political corruption that afforded protection to gambling, prostitution, and other vice activity in Chicago and other large American cities, Robert M. Lombardo challenges the dominant belief that organized crime in America descended directly from the Sicilian Mafia. According to this widespread "alien conspiracy" theory, organized crime evolved in a linear fashion beginning with the Mafia in Sicily, emerging in the form of the Black Hand in America's immigrant colonies, and culminating in the development of the Cosa Nostra in America's urban centers. Looking beyond this Mafia paradigm, this volume argues that the development of organized crime in Chicago and other large American cities was rooted in the social structure of American society. Specifically, Lombardo ties organized crime to the emergence of machine politics in America's urban centers. From nineteenth-century vice syndicates to the modern-day Outfit, Chicago's criminal underworld could not have existed without the blessing of those who controlled municipal, county, and state government. These practices were not imported from Sicily, Lombardo contends, but were bred in the socially disorganized slums of America where elected officials routinely franchised vice and crime in exchange for money and votes. This book also traces the history of the African-American community's participation in traditional organized crime in Chicago and offers new perspectives on the organizational structure of the Chicago Outfit, the traditional organized crime group in Chicago.

Worlds Before Adam
Worlds Before Adam

Author: Martin J. S. Rudwick

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2010-04-05

Total Pages: 639

ISBN-13: 0226731308

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In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, scientists reconstructed the immensely long history of the earth—and the relatively recent arrival of human life. The geologists of the period, many of whom were devout believers, agreed about this vast timescale. But despite this apparent harmony between geology and Genesis, these scientists still debated a great many questions: Had the earth cooled from its origin as a fiery ball in space, or had it always been the same kind of place as it is now? Was prehuman life marked by mass extinctions, or had fauna and flora changed slowly over time? The first detailed account of the reconstruction of prehuman geohistory, Martin J. S. Rudwick’s Worlds Before Adam picks up where his celebrated Bursting the Limits of Time leaves off. Here, Rudwick takes readers from the post-Napoleonic Restoration in Europe to the early years of Britain’s Victorian age, chronicling the staggering discoveries geologists made during the period: the unearthing of the first dinosaur fossils, the glacial theory of the last ice age, and the meaning of igneous rocks, among others. Ultimately, Rudwick reveals geology to be the first of the sciences to investigate the historical dimension of nature, a model that Charles Darwin used in developing his evolutionary theory. Featuring an international cast of colorful characters, with Georges Cuvier and Charles Lyell playing major roles and Darwin appearing as a young geologist, Worlds Before Adam is a worthy successor to Rudwick’s magisterial first volume. Completing the highly readable narrative of one of the most momentous changes in human understanding of our place in the natural world, Worlds Before Adam is a capstone to the career of one of the world’s leading historians of science.