"Illustrated in full color, the book is based on Amore's multimedia exhibition Life line - filo della vita, which traveled to great acclaim from the Ellis Island Museum to Boston, Rome, and Naples. Woven throughout the fully bilingual text are numerous interviews and historic photographs from the Ellis Island archives. Also included are original essays by noted scholars - Pellegrino D'Acierno, Fred Gardaphie, Jennifer Guglielmo, Edvige Giunta, Flavia Rando, Joseph Sciorra, and Robert Viscusi - who take Amore's art as a starting point for illuminating explorations of the immigrant experience, from the aesthetics of cultural memory and the persistence of ethnic identity to issues of gender, race, and generational change in Italian-American history and life."--BOOK JACKET.
The inspiring, true coming-of-age story of a ferociously determined young man who, armed only with his intellect and his willpower, fights his way out of despair. In 1993, Cedric Jennings was a bright and ferociously determined honor student at Ballou, a high school in one of Washington D.C.’s most dangerous neighborhoods, where the dropout rate was well into double digits and just 80 students out of more than 1,350 boasted an average of B or better. At Ballou, Cedric had almost no friends. He ate lunch in a classroom most days, plowing through the extra work he asked for, knowing that he was really competing with kids from other, harder schools. Cedric Jennings’s driving ambition—which was fully supported by his forceful mother—was to attend a top college. In September 1995, after years of near superhuman dedication, he realized that ambition when he began as a freshman at Brown University. But he didn't leave his struggles behind. He found himself unprepared for college: he struggled to master classwork and fit in with the white upper-class students. Having traveled too far to turn back, Cedric was left to rely on his intelligence and his determination to maintain hope in the unseen—a future of acceptance and reward. In this updated edition, A Hope in the Unseen chronicles Cedric’s odyssey during his last two years of high school, follows him through his difficult first year at Brown, and tells the story of his subsequent successes in college and the world of work. Eye-opening, sometimes humorous, and often deeply moving, A Hope in the Unseen weaves a crucial new thread into the rich and ongoing narrative of the American experience.
The O’Shaughnessy brothers’ story takes place between 1860 and 1950 in Illinois, Missouri, New York, and Ireland. They were the children of an impoverished immigrant who fled the famine in Ireland and his Irish-American wife.An Irish-American Odysseyis the tale of this first-generation immigrant family’s struggle to assimilate into American society, highlighting their perseverance and determination to seize opportunities and surmount obstacles, all the while establishing a legacy for their own descendants in American art, advertising, journalism, and public service. TIME magazine called James O’Shaughnessy “the best in the business” of advertising, and he became the first chief executive of the American Association of Advertising Agencies. Earlier, he was a “star” reporter at the Chicago Tribune, and James and Francis were centrally involved in founding and maintaining the Irish Fellowship Club. Francis was also the first graduate of the University of Notre Dame to be invited to deliver its annual commencement address, while Martin was the first captain of Notre Dame’s official basketball team. An attorney, John represented the alleged victim in a notorious “white slavery” case. Thomas (“Gus”) became the leading Gaelic Revival artist in America as well as a promoter of Italian-American heritage, campaigning successfully to have Columbus Day enacted a public holiday. The remarkable rise of the O’Shaughnessy brothers proves the American dream is attainable.
“Wise and witty.”―Publishers Weekly “A charming story well told.”―Kirkus Reviews “Smart, funny, charming . . . full of astute insights into the way Italy works.”―Alexander Stille “A wonderfully fun read.”―Dr. Robert Sapolsky "As funny as it is poignant. A must read for anyone who thinks they understand medicine, Italy, or humanity.”―Barbie Latza Nadeau After completing her medical training in New York, Susan Levenstein set off for a one year adventure in Rome. Forty years later, she is still practicing medicine in the Eternal City. In Dottoressa: An American Doctor in Rome Levenstein writes, with love and exasperation, about navigating her career through the renowned Italian tangle of brilliance and ineptitude, sexism and tolerance, rigidity and chaos. Part memoir―starting with her epic quest for an Italian medical license―and part portrait of Italy from a unique point of view, Dottoressa is packed with vignettes that illuminate the national differences in character, lifestyle, health, and health care between her two countries. Levenstein, who has been called “the wittiest internist on earth,” covers everything from hookup culture to neighborhood madmen, Italian hands-off medical training, bidets, the ironies of expatriation, and why Italians always pay their doctor’s bills.
Fourteen cultural history essays exploring the relationship between Italian Americans, consumer culture, and the American identity. How do immigrants and their children forge their identities in a new land? And how does the ethnic culture they create thrive in the larger society? Making Italian America brings together new scholarship on the cultural history of consumption, immigration, and ethnic marketing to explore these questions by focusing on the case of an ethnic group whose material culture and lifestyles have been central to American life: Italian Americans. As embodied in fashion, film, food, popular music, sports, and many other representations and commodities, Italian American identities have profoundly fascinated, disturbed, and influenced American and global culture. Discussing in fresh ways topics as diverse as immigrant women’s fashion, critiques of consumerism in Italian immigrant radicalism, the Italian American influence in early rock ’n’ roll, ethnic tourism in Little Italy, and Guido subculture, Making Italian America recasts Italian immigrants and their children as active consumers who, since the turn of the twentieth century, have creatively managed to articulate relations of race, gender, and class and create distinctive lifestyles out of materials the marketplace offered to them. The success of these mostly working-class people in making their everyday culture meaningful to them as well as in shaping an ethnic identity that appealed to a wider public of shoppers and spectators looms large in the political history of consumption. Making Italian America appraises how immigrants and their children redesigned the market to suit their tastes and in the process made Italian American identities a lure for millions of consumers. Fourteen essays explore Italian American history in the light of consumer culture, across more than a century-long intense movement of people, goods, money, ideas, and images between Italy and the United States—a diasporic exchange that has transformed both nations. Simone Cinotto builds an analytical framework for understanding the ways in which ethnic and racial groups have shaped their collective identities and negotiated their place in the consumers’ emporium and marketplace. Grounded in the new scholarship in transnational US history and the transfer of cultural patterns, Making Italian America illuminates the crucial role that consumption has had in shaping the ethnic culture and diasporic identities of Italians in America. It also illustrates vividly why and how those same identities—incorporated in commodities, commercial leisure, and popular representations—have become the object of desire for millions of American and global consumers. “This compelling and innovative volume captures the complexities of the pivotal role of consumption in the historical formation of transnational Italian American taste, positing a distinctive diasporic consumer culture that continues its importance today. Richly interdisciplinary, the collection represents an exciting new resource for scholars and students alike.” —Marilyn Halter, Boston University
Caribbean immigrants have now become part of the social landscape of many American cities. Few studies, however, have treated in detail the process of their integration in American society. American Odyssey assesses the development and adaptation, in both human and socio-economic terms, of the Haitian immigrant community in three boroughs of New York City. An informed and well-rounded portrayal of a Caribbean community in New York, this book offers a fresh theoretical view of the structuring of urban ethnicity and provides the ethnographic background essential to understanding the problems of the Haitian population in the United States.
American Odyssey, a novel set in the not-too-distant future, is the chilling story of a totalitarian America that has plummeted to a nation set on world domination. The protagonist, Herb, is a young "everyman", a schoolteacher. He falls in love with a colleague who introduces him to the resistance movement. A series of personal misfortunes, including the death of his soldier twin, impel him to become a dedicated activist against the dictatorship. His group is soon exposed, and he and his love, Tony, become fugitives. She is soon killed. At that point Herb's odyssey begins as he travels the nation in search of "the movement". The preponderance of the novel reveals the state of the nation and of the people. He comes into contact with a cross-section of the United States. They are men and women -- laborers, farmers, professionals, students..They are Black and white and Hispanic, and each is unique in the manner in which his/her life has been degraded under the dictatorship. At the beginning they are impoverished, fearful, dispirited. In time, as the economic crisis deepens and battlefield losses mount, there are changes in the populace. Apathy turns to anger and then to resistance. Herb becomes reconnected with the opposition to the dictatorship. The American people in large numbers, disheartened by the desperate quality of their lives, simply "opt-out" of the system. The military, too, appalled by the unending wars and bloodshed, also becomes disaffected. Millions converge upon Washington, D.C. the dictatorship falls, and the foundation is laid for the re-establishment of democracy in the United States.
This richly researched, beautifully illustrated volume illuminates an important, overlooked part of American history. From extensive archival materials and interviews with well-known Italian Americans, Maria Laurino strips away stereotypes and nostalgia to tell the complicated, centuries-long story of the true Italian-American experience. Looking beyond the familiar Little Italys and stereotypes fostered by The Godfather and The Sopranos, Laurino reveals surprising, fascinating lives: Italian-Americans working on sugar-cane plantations in Louisiana to those who were lynched in New Orleans; the banker who helped rebuild San Francisco after the great earthquake; families interned as “enemy aliens” in World War II. From anarchist radicals to “Rosie the Riveter” to Nancy Pelosi, Andrew Cuomo, and Bill de Blasio; from traditional artisans to rebel songsters like Frank Sinatra, Dion, Madonna, and Lady Gaga, this book is both exploration and celebration of the rich legacy of Italian-American life. Readers can discover the history chronologically, chapter by chapter, or serendipitously by exploring the trove of supplemental materials. These include interviews, newspaper clippings, period documents, and photographs that bring the history to life.
Brooklyn, or "Bruculinu," as many Italians affectionately pronounced it, is where Italian values, culture, and dreams thrived. In an era when over four million Italians found their way to America, the first significant influx came during the 1880s, primarily from rural peasant communities fleeing poverty and overpopulation. Although Italians in South Brooklyn have been traced back as far as the 1820s, most settled in Manhattan. The 1855 New York Census did not list any Italian natives in Brooklyn; however, by 1890, there were 9,563 Italians residing in the borough. By 1900, Brooklyn's Italian population was second only to Manhattan. Although the last notable wave of Italian immigration ended in the 1960s, Italian remains one of the six prevalent foreign languages in New York according to a 2007 census estimate. This work serves as a time capsule to remind us of the contributions and influences these immigrants have offered to the community.
