Italian American Material Culture

Italian American Material Culture PDF Author: Margaret Hobbie
Publisher: Greenwood
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 202

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Book Description
This publication focuses on material culture and photographic collections, historic sites, and festivals. An introductory overview is followed by the identification of objects, photographic images, and oral histories held by museums and other repositories. Buildings, towns, and neighborhoods associated with Italian American history, as well as over 100 religious feasts and secular festivals are included.

Italian American Material Culture

Italian American Material Culture PDF Author: Margaret Hobbie
Publisher: Greenwood
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 202

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Book Description
This publication focuses on material culture and photographic collections, historic sites, and festivals. An introductory overview is followed by the identification of objects, photographic images, and oral histories held by museums and other repositories. Buildings, towns, and neighborhoods associated with Italian American history, as well as over 100 religious feasts and secular festivals are included.

Built with Faith

Built with Faith PDF Author: Joseph Sciorra
Publisher: Univ. of Tennessee Press
ISBN: 162190119X
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 305

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Book Description
Contents -- Acknowledgements -- Introduction -- 1. Private Devotions in Public Places: The Sacred Spaces of Yard Shrines and Sidewalk Altars -- 2. Imagined Places and Fragile Landscapes: Nostalgia and Utopia in Nativity Presepi -- 3. Festive Intensification and Place Consciousness in Christmas House Displays -- 4. Multivocality and Sacred Space: The Our Lady of Mount Carmel Grotto in Rosebank, Staten Island -- "We Go Where the Italians Live": Processions as Glocal Mapping in Williamsburg, Brooklyn -- Conclusion -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index

Making Italian America

Making Italian America PDF Author: Simone Cinotto
Publisher: Fordham University Press
ISBN: 0823256278
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 352

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Book Description
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 imaginative 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 U.S. 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.

Highlights from the Italian American Collection

Highlights from the Italian American Collection PDF Author: Melissa E. Marinaro
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780936340302
Category : Immigrants
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
"Highlights from the Italian American Collection: Western Pennsylvania Stories is a fascinating visual history presented through the Heinz History Center's collection of artifacts, archives, and oral histories. The collection is one of the most comprehensive of its kind in the United States and documents the pivotal role Italian Americans played in shaping the region's political, economic, religious, and cultural landscapes. This important collection gives voice to the immigrant experience in America"--

The Italian American Table

The Italian American Table PDF Author: Simone Cinotto
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 0252095014
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 313

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Book Description
Best Food Book of 2014 by The Atlantic Looking at the historic Italian American community of East Harlem in the 1920s and 30s, Simone Cinotto recreates the bustling world of Italian life in New York City and demonstrates how food was at the center of the lives of immigrants and their children. From generational conflicts resolved around the family table to a vibrant food-based economy of ethnic producers, importers, and restaurateurs, food was essential to the creation of an Italian American identity. Italian American foods offered not only sustenance but also powerful narratives of community and difference, tradition and innovation as immigrants made their way through a city divided by class conflict, ethnic hostility, and racialized inequalities. Drawing on a vast array of resources including fascinating, rarely explored primary documents and fresh approaches in the study of consumer culture, Cinotto argues that Italian immigrants created a distinctive culture of food as a symbolic response to the needs of immigrant life, from the struggle for personal and group identity to the pursuit of social and economic power. Adding a transnational dimension to the study of Italian American foodways, Cinotto recasts Italian American food culture as an American "invention" resonant with traces of tradition.

Italian Folk

Italian Folk PDF Author: Joseph Sciorra
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
ISBN: 0823232654
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 270

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Book Description
Sunday dinners, basement kitchens, and backyard gardens are everyday cultural entities long associated with Italian Americans, yet the general perception of them remains superficial and stereotypical at best. For many people, these scenarios trigger ingrained assumptions about individuals' beliefs, politics, aesthetics, values, and behaviors that leave little room for nuance and elaboration. This collection of essays explores local knowledge and aesthetic practices, often marked as "folklore," as sources for creativity and meaning in Italian-American lives. As the contributors demonstrate, folklore provides contemporary scholars with occasions for observing and interpreting behaviors and objects as part of lived experiences. Its study provides new ways of understanding how individuals and groups reproduce and contest identities and ideologies through expressive means. Italian Folk offers an opportunity to reexamine and rethink what we know about Italian Americans. The contributors to this unique book discuss historic and contemporary cultural expressions and religious practices from various parts of the United States and Canada to examine how they operate at local, national, and transnational levels. The essays attest to people's ability and willingness to create and reproduce certain cultural modes that connect them to social entities such as the family, the neighborhood, and the amorphous and fleeting communities that emerge in large-scale festivals and now on the Internet. Italian Americans abandon, reproduce, and/or revive various cultural elements in relationship to ever-shifting political, economic, and social conditions. The results are dynamic, hybrid cultural forms such as valtaro accordion music, Sicilian oral poetry, a Columbus Day parade, and witchcraft (stregheria). By taking a closer look and an ethnographic approach to expressive behavior, we see that Italian-American identity is far from being a linear path of assimilation from Italian immigrant to American of Italian descent but is instead fraught with conflict, negotiation, and creative solutions. Together, these essays illustrate how folklore is evoked in the continual process of identity revaluation and reformation.

Sense of Origins

Sense of Origins PDF Author: Rosemary Serra
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 1438479204
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 382

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Book Description
In Sense of Origins, Rosemary Serra explores the lives of a significant group of self-identified young Italian Americans residing in New York City and its surrounding areas. The book presents and examines the results of a survey she conducted of their values, family relationships, prejudices and stereotypes, affiliations, attitudes and behaviors, and future perspectives of Italian American culture. The core of the study focuses on self-identification with Italian cultural heritage and analyzes it according to five aspects—physical, personality, cultural, psychological, and emotional/affective. The data provides insights into today's young Italian Americans and the ways their perception of reality in everyday interactions is affected by their heritage, while shedding light on the value and symbolic references that come with an Italian heritage. Through her rendering of relevant facets that emerge from the study, Serra constructs interpretative models useful for outlining the physiognomy and characterization of second, third, fourth, and fifth generations of Italian Americans. In the current climate, questions of ethnicity and migrant identity around the world make Sense of Origins useful not only to the Italian American community but also to the descendants of the innumerable present-day migrants who find themselves living in countries different from those of their ancestors. The book will resonate in future explorations of ethnic identity in the United States.

The Italian American Heritage

The Italian American Heritage PDF Author: Pellegrino A D'Acierno
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000525554
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 542

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Book Description
First published in 1999. The many available scholarly works on Italian-Americans are perhaps of little practical help to the undergraduate or high school student who needs background information when reading contemporary fiction with Italian characters, watching films that require a familiarity with Italian Americans, or looking at works of art that can be fully appreciated only if one understands Italian culture. This basic reference work for non-specialists and students offers quick insights and essential, easy-to-grasp information on Italian-American contributions to American art, music, literature, motion pictures and cultural life. This rich legacy is examined in a collection of original essays that include portrayals of Italian characters in the films of Francis Coppola, Italian American poetry, the art of Frank Stella, the music of Frank Zappa, a survey of Italian folk customs and an analysis of the evolution of Italian-American biography. Comprising 22 lengthy essays written specifically for this volume, the book identifies what is uniquely Italian in American life and examines how Italian customs, traditions, social mores and cultural antecedents have wrought their influence on the American character. Filled with insights, observations and ethnic facts and fictions, this volume should prove to be a valuable source of information for scholars, researchers and students interested in pinpointing and examining the cultural, intellectual and social influence of Italian immigrants and their successors.

New Italian Migrations to the United States

New Italian Migrations to the United States PDF Author: Laura E Ruberto
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 0252099990
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 319

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Book Description
This second volume of New Italian Migrations to the United States explores the evolution of art and cultural expressions created by and about Italian immigrants and their descendants since 1945. The essays range from an Italian-language radio program that broadcast intimate messages from family members in Italy to the role of immigrant cookbook writers in crafting a fashionable Italian food culture. Other works look at how exoticized actresses like Sophia Loren and Pier Angeli helped shape a glamorous Italian style out of images of desperate postwar poverty; overlooked forms of brain drain; the connections between countries old and new in the works of Michigan self-taught artist Silvio Barile; and folk revival performer Alessandra Belloni's reinterpretation of tarantella dance and music for Italian American women. In the afterword, Anthony Julian Tamburri discusses the nomenclature ascribed to Italian American creative writers living in Italy and the United States. Contributors: John Allan Cicala, Simone Cinotto, Teresa Fiore, Incoronata (Nadia) Inserra, Laura E. Ruberto, Joseph Sciorra, and Anthony Julian Tamburri.

Italian Americans

Italian Americans PDF Author: Eric Martone
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 792

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Book Description
The entire Italian American experience—from America's earliest days through the present—is now available in a single volume. This wide-ranging work relates the entire saga of the Italian-American experience from immigration through assimilation to achievement. The book highlights the enormous contributions that Italian Americans—the fourth largest European ethnic group in the United States—have made to the professions, politics, academy, arts, and popular culture of America. Going beyond familiar names and stories, it also captures the essence of everyday life for Italian Americans as they established communities and interacted with other ethnic groups. In this single volume, readers will be able to explore why Italians came to America, where they settled, and how their distinctive identity was formed. A diverse array of entries that highlight the breadth of this experience, as well as the multitude of ways in which Italian Americans have influenced U.S. history and culture, are presented in five thematic sections. Featured primary documents range from a 1493 letter from Christopher Columbus announcing his discovery to excerpts from President Barack Obama's 2011 speech to the National Italian American Foundation. Readers will come away from this book with a broader understanding of and greater appreciation for Italian Americans' contributions to the United States.