Italian Prisoners of War in Pennsylvania

Italian Prisoners of War in Pennsylvania PDF Author: Flavio G. Conti
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1611479983
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 319

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Book Description
During World War II 51,000 Italian prisoners of war were detained in the United States. When Italy signed an armistice with the Allies in September 1943, most of these soldiers agreed to swear allegiance to the United States and to collaborate in the fight against Germany. At the Letterkenny Army Depot, located near Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, more than 1,200 Italian soldiers were detained as co-operators. They arrived in May 1944 to form the 321st Italian Quartermaster Battalion and remained until October 1945. As detainees, the soldiers helped to order, stock, repair, and ship military goods, munitions and equipment to the Pacific and European Theaters of war. Through such labor, they lent their collective energy to the massive home front endeavor to defeat the Axis Powers. The prisoners also helped to construct the depot itself, building roads, sidewalks, and fences, along with individual buildings such as an assembly hall, amphitheater, swimming pool, and a chapel and bell tower. The latter of these two constructions still exist, and together with the assembly hall, bear eloquent testimony to the Italian POW experience. For their work the Italian co-operators received a very modest, regular salary, and they experienced more freedom than regular POWs. In their spare time, they often had liberty to leave the post in groups that American soldiers chaperoned. Additionally, they frequently received or visited large entourages of Italian Americans from the Mid-Atlantic region who were eager to comfort their erstwhile countrymen. The story of these Italian soldiers detained at Letterkenny has never before been told. Now, however, oral histories from surviving POWs, memoirs generously donated by family members of ex-prisoners, and the rich information newly available from archival material in Italy, aided by material found in the U.S., have made it possible to reconstruct this experience in full. All of this historical documentation has also allowed the authors to tell fascinating individual stories from the moment when many POWs were captured to their return to Italy and beyond. More than seventy years since the end of World War II, family members of ex-POWs in both the United States and Italy still enjoy the positive legacy of this encounter.

Italian Repatriation from the United States, 1900-1914

Italian Repatriation from the United States, 1900-1914 PDF Author: Betty Boyd Caroli
Publisher: Backinprint.com
ISBN: 9780595484478
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 124

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Book Description
When Betty Boyd Caroli traveled to Italy on a Fulbright in 1970, she had a purpose: to find Italians who had journeyed to America to work between 1900 and 1914 and then returned to live in Italy. Sometimes she found clubs of "repatriates", sitting under American flags and pictures of JFK. Individuals told her their stories-why they left for "bread" but returned for "family". Caroli puts these workers in context, giving statistics from both countries and citing accounts written by their contemporaries, to help us understand the price paid by these "birds of passage".

Italian Prisoners of War in Pennsylvania

Italian Prisoners of War in Pennsylvania PDF Author: Flavio G. Conti
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1611479983
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 319

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Book Description
During World War II 51,000 Italian prisoners of war were detained in the United States. When Italy signed an armistice with the Allies in September 1943, most of these soldiers agreed to swear allegiance to the United States and to collaborate in the fight against Germany. At the Letterkenny Army Depot, located near Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, more than 1,200 Italian soldiers were detained as co-operators. They arrived in May 1944 to form the 321st Italian Quartermaster Battalion and remained until October 1945. As detainees, the soldiers helped to order, stock, repair, and ship military goods, munitions and equipment to the Pacific and European Theaters of war. Through such labor, they lent their collective energy to the massive home front endeavor to defeat the Axis Powers. The prisoners also helped to construct the depot itself, building roads, sidewalks, and fences, along with individual buildings such as an assembly hall, amphitheater, swimming pool, and a chapel and bell tower. The latter of these two constructions still exist, and together with the assembly hall, bear eloquent testimony to the Italian POW experience. For their work the Italian co-operators received a very modest, regular salary, and they experienced more freedom than regular POWs. In their spare time, they often had liberty to leave the post in groups that American soldiers chaperoned. Additionally, they frequently received or visited large entourages of Italian Americans from the Mid-Atlantic region who were eager to comfort their erstwhile countrymen. The story of these Italian soldiers detained at Letterkenny has never before been told. Now, however, oral histories from surviving POWs, memoirs generously donated by family members of ex-prisoners, and the rich information newly available from archival material in Italy, aided by material found in the U.S., have made it possible to reconstruct this experience in full. All of this historical documentation has also allowed the authors to tell fascinating individual stories from the moment when many POWs were captured to their return to Italy and beyond. More than seventy years since the end of World War II, family members of ex-POWs in both the United States and Italy still enjoy the positive legacy of this encounter.

Italian Repatriation from the United States

Italian Repatriation from the United States PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780091325107
Category : Italy
Languages : en
Pages : 110

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Book Description


Enemies Among Us

Enemies Among Us PDF Author: John E. Schmitz
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 1496227557
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 351

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Book Description
Recent decades have drawn more attention to the United States' treatment of Japanese Americans during World War II. Few people realize, however, the extent of the country's relocation, internment, and repatriation of German and Italian Americans, who were interned in greater numbers than Japanese Americans. The United States also assisted other countries, especially in Latin America, in expelling "dangerous" aliens, primarily Germans. In Enemies among Us John E. Schmitz examines the causes, conditions, and consequences of America's selective relocation and internment of its own citizens and enemy aliens, as well as the effects of internment on those who experienced it. Looking at German, Italian, and Japanese Americans, Schmitz analyzes the similarities in the U.S. government's procedures for those they perceived to be domestic and hemispheric threats, revealing the consistencies in the government's treatment of these groups, regardless of race. Reframing wartime relocation and internment through a broader chronological perspective and considering policies in the wider Western Hemisphere, Enemies among Us provides new conclusions as to why the United States relocated, interned, and repatriated both aliens and citizens considered enemies.

The World Refugees Made

The World Refugees Made PDF Author: Pamela Ballinger
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501747592
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 294

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Book Description
In The World Refugees Made, Pamela Ballinger explores Italy's remaking in light of the loss of a wide range of territorial possessions—colonies, protectorates, and provinces—in Africa and the Balkans, the repatriation of Italian nationals from those territories, and the integration of these "national refugees" into a country devastated by war and overwhelmed by foreign displaced persons from Eastern Europe. Post-World War II Italy served as an important laboratory, in which categories differentiating foreign refugees (who had crossed national boundaries) from national refugees (those who presumably did not) were debated, refined, and consolidated. Such distinctions resonated far beyond that particular historical moment, informing legal frameworks that remain in place today. Offering an alternative genealogy of the postwar international refugee regime, Ballinger focuses on the consequences of one of its key omissions: the ineligibility from international refugee status of those migrants who became classified as national refugees. The presence of displaced persons also posed the complex question of who belonged, culturally and legally, in an Italy that was territorially and politically reconfigured by decolonization. The process of demarcating types of refugees thus represented a critical moment for Italy, one that endorsed an ethnic conception of identity that citizenship laws made explicit. Such an understanding of identity remains salient, as Italians still invoke language and race as bases of belonging in the face of mass immigration and ongoing refugee emergencies. Ballinger's analysis of the postwar international refugee regime and Italian decolonization illuminates the study of human rights history, humanitarianism, postwar reconstruction, fascism and its aftermaths, and modern Italian history.

Making Italian America

Making Italian America PDF Author: Simone Cinotto
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
ISBN: 082325626X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 358

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Book Description
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

The Getty Bronze

The Getty Bronze PDF Author: Jiří Frel
Publisher: Getty Publications
ISBN: 0892360399
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 66

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Book Description
Released from his prison of incrustation, having rested on the ocean floor for thousands of years, the bronze statue of an athlete stands in a quietly arrogant pose, having just placed an olive crown—the symbol of victory in the Olympic Games—on his head. In this monograph devoted to the Getty Bronze, Dr. Frel analyzes the technique and style that point to its attribution to the great fourth-century Greek sculptor Lysippos. The conservation of the bronze, its possible identity as a Hellenistic prince, and its place in Lysippos’s oeuvre are discussed.

U.S. Immigration Policy and the National Interest

U.S. Immigration Policy and the National Interest PDF Author: United States. Select Commission on Immigration and Refugee Policy
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Emigration and immigration law
Languages : en
Pages : 632

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Book Description


La Merica

La Merica PDF Author: Michael La Sorte
Publisher: Temple University Press
ISBN: 1592132340
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 249

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Book Description
Why would a man tie up a cheap suitcase with grass rope, leave his family and his paesani in Italy to risk his life and meager possessions among the dock thieves of Naples and Genoa to suffer the congestion and stench of steerage accommodations aboard ship, to endure the assembly-line processing of Ellis Island, to wander almost incommunicado through a city of sneering strangers speaking an unknown tongue, to perform ten to twelve hours of heavy manual labor a day for wages of perhaps $1.65—most of which he probably owed to the "company store" before he got it? Why were there not just a few such men but droves of them coming to the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century? How did they survive and—some of them—prosper? How did they surmount the language barrier? Why did some stay, some go home, and some bounce back and forth repeatedly across the Atlantic? Michael La Sorte examines these questions and more in this lively study of Italian immigration prior to World War I. In exploring for answers, he draws upon the commentary of recent scholars, as well as the statistical documents of the day. But most importantly, he has searched out individual stories in the published and unpublished diaries, letters, and autobiographies of immigrants who lived the "greenhorn" (grignoni) experience. In their own language, the men bring to life the teeming tenements of New York's Mulberry Street, the exploitative labor-recruiting practices of Boston's North Square, and the harsh squalor of work camp life along the country's expanding railroad lines. What emerges is a powerful, moving, alternately funny and appalling picture of their everyday lives. Through detailed narration, La Sorte traces the men's lives from their native villages across the Atlantic through the ports of entry to their first immigrant jobs. He describes their views of Italy, America, and each other, the cultural and linguistic adjustments that they were compelled to make, and their motives for either Americanizing or repatriating themselves. His chapter on "Italglish" (a hybrid language developed by the greenhorns) will echo in the ears of Italian-Americans as the sound of their parents' and grandparents' voices.

Ruling Culture

Ruling Culture PDF Author: Fiona Greenland
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022675703X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
"A major, on-the-ground look at antiquities looting in Italy. More looting of ancient art takes place in Italy than in any other country. Ironically, Italy trades on the fact to demonstrate its cultural superiority over other countries. And, more than any other country, Italy takes pains to prevent looting by instituting laws, cultural policies, export taxes, and a famously effective art-crime squad that has been the inspiration of novels, movies, and tv shows. In fact, Italy is widely regarded as having invented the discipline of art policing. In 2006 the then-president of Italy declared his country to be "the world's greatest cultural power." Why do Italians believe this? Why is the patria, or "homeland," so frequently invoked in modern disputes about ancient art, particularly when it comes to matters of repatriation, export, and museum loans? Fiona Greenland's Ruling Culture addresses these questions by tracing the emergence of antiquities as a key source of power in Italy from 1815 to the present. Along the way, it investigates the activities and interactions of three main sets of actors: state officials (including Art Squad agents), archaeologists, and illicit excavators and collectors"--