Una Storia Segreta brings a new perspective to the history of wartime violations of civilian populations. The essays in this volume bring together the voices of the Italian American community and experts in the field, including personal stories by survivors and their children, letters from internment camps, news clips, photographs, and cartoons.
This is one of Le Fanu's earlier stories. Set in Ireland, it is written as though le Fanu was a priest named Purcell, it contains all the ingredients of the classic Gothic horror story. The countess is known only as Countess D. All we know about her at first is that her family and the family into which she married, are now entirely extinct.
When the United States entered World War II, Italian nationals living in this country were declared enemy aliens and faced with legal restrictions. Several thousand aliens and a few U.S. citizens were arrested and underwent flawed hearings, and hundreds were interned. Shedding new light on an injustice often overshadowed by the mass confinement of Japanese Americans, Mary Elizabeth Basile Chopas traces how government and military leaders constructed wartime policies affecting Italian residents. Based on new archival research into the alien enemy hearings, this in-depth legal analysis illuminates a process not widely understood. From presumptive guilt in the arrest and internment based on membership in social and political organizations, to hurdles in attaining American citizenship, Chopas uncovers many layers of repression not heretofore revealed in scholarship about the World War II home front. In telling the stories of former internees and persons excluded from military zones as they attempted to resume their lives after the war, Chopas demonstrates the lasting social and cultural effects of government policies on the Italian American community, and addresses the modern problem of identifying threats in a largely loyal and peaceful population.
How did immigrants to the United States come to see themselves as white? David R. Roediger has been in the vanguard of the study of race and labor in American history for decades. He first came to prominence as the author of The Wages of Whiteness, a classic study of racism in the development of a white working class in nineteenth-century America. In Working Toward Whiteness, Roediger continues that history into the twentieth century. He recounts how ethnic groups considered white today-including Jewish-, Italian-, and Polish-Americans-were once viewed as undesirables by the WASP establishment in the United States. They eventually became part of white America, through the nascent labor movement, New Deal reforms, and a rise in home-buying. Once assimilated as fully white, many of them adopted the racism of those whites who formerly looked down on them as inferior. From ethnic slurs to racially restrictive covenants-the real estate agreements that ensured all-white neighborhoods-Roediger explores the mechanisms by which immigrants came to enjoy the privileges of being white in America. A disturbing, necessary, masterful history, Working Toward Whiteness uses the past to illuminate the present. In an Introduction to the 2018 edition, Roediger considers the resonance of the book in the age of Trump, showing how Working Toward Whiteness remains as relevant as ever even though most migrants today are not from Europe.
This book details the Italian immigrant experience in San Francisco from the Gold Rush to the Mayoralty of George Moscone - which is to say the entire life cycle of the Italian community - and defines the concept of community in a way never seen before.
An award-winning self help guide to healing emotional wounds and building resiliency, inspired by the Japanese art of kintsugi—includes photos. Kintsugi is the ancient Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with powdered gold. Day after day, week after week, stage by stage, the object is cleaned, groomed, treated, healed, and finally enhanced. Nowadays it has also become a well-known therapy metaphor for how to build resilience. Winner of the 2019 Golden Nautilus Book Award, Kintsugi offers practical advice to help you overcome rough times, heal your deepest wounds, and become whole again through the numerous stages, writing exercises, and testimonies.
An international bestseller and winner of Italy's prestigious Premio Bancarella prize—an intense psychological thriller in the vein of The Talented Mr. Ripley As world-weary Lieutenant Chiti spends sleepless nights hunting for the serial rapist terrorizing his city, trainee lawyer Giorgio is befriended by dangerously charismatic Francesco. Slowly the innocent Giorgio is lured into a corrupt world of beautiful women and casual violence. Then one terrifying night Giorgio is forced to realize just how far he has left his past behind. "Set largely in the southern Italian city of Bari, this stylish psychological thriller from Carofiglio (A Walk in the Dark) fuses Jack Kerouac's On the Road with hard-edged crime fiction à la Henning Mankell's Inspector Wallander saga." - Publishers Weekly
A photographic history of Italian-American life. The Italian imprint on North America that began centuries ago with the voyages of Christopher Columbus, Amerigo Vespucci, and Giovanni da Verrazzano continues in every aspect of American life today. This book celebrates the contributions Italians made in the areas of agriculture, cuisine, industry, religion, sports, architecture, the arts, and politics, and how they preserved their culture while establishing their presence in America. Beginning with the first major wave of immigration in the 1870s, this book portrays Italian-American hardships and successes, along with the lifestyles, organizations, and businesses they created in communities throughout the country. Four hundred photographs from public and private collections portray this colorful ethnic group in settings from the crowded streets of Naples to crowded ships bound for America, to Californian farmers and family celebrations in New York.
Napoli/New York/Hollywood is an absorbing investigation of the significant impact that Italian immigrant actors, musicians, and directors—and the southern Italian stage traditions they embodied—have had on the history of Hollywood cinema and American media, from 1895 to the present day. In a unique exploration of the transnational communication between American and Italian film industries, media or performing arts as practiced in Naples, New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, this groundbreaking book looks at the historical context and institutional film history from the illuminating perspective of the performers themselves—the workers who lend their bodies and their performance culture to screen representations. In doing so, the author brings to light the cultural work of families and generations of artists that have contributed not only to American film culture, but also to the cultural construction and evolution of “Italian-ness” over the past century. Napoli/New York/Hollywood offers a major contribution to our understanding of the role of southern Italian culture in American cinema, from the silent era to contemporary film. Using a provocative interdisciplinary approach, the author associates southern Italian culture with modernity and the immigrants’ preservation of cultural traditions with innovations in the mode of production and in the use of media technologies (theatrical venues, music records, radio, ethnic films). Each chapter synthesizes a wealth of previously under-studied material and displays the author’s exceptional ability to cover transnational cinematic issues within an historical context. For example, her analysis of the period from the end of World War I until the beginning of sound in film production in the end of the 1920s, delivers a meaningful revision of the relationship between Fascism and American cinema, and Italian emigration. Napoli/New York/Hollywood examines the careers of those Italian performers who were Italian not only because of their origins but because their theatrical culture was Italian, a culture that embraced high and low, tragedy and comedy, music, dance and even acrobatics, naturalism, and improvisation. Their previously unexplored story—that of the Italian diaspora’s influence on American cinema—is here meticulously reconstructed through rich primary sources, deep archival research, extensive film analysis, and an enlightening series of interviews with heirs to these traditions, including Francis Coppola and his sister Talia Shire, John Turturro, Nancy Savoca, James Gandolfini, David Chase, Joe Dante, and Annabella Sciorra.