Italian Americans

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• SOURCE: Washington Post
  9/25/2022
  

  When Italian Immigrants were Tricked into Debt Peonage in the Jim Crow South

  A labor agency in Mississippi experimented with a creative, if evil, solution to the problem of Black demands for labor rights at the turn of the 20th century: trick Italian farmers to sign contracts that shackled them with debt to their employers.  

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• SOURCE: Made By History at the Washington Post
  10/11/2021
  

  "Many Saints" Misses Chance to Tell Key Moment of Newark History

  by Mary Rizzo and Whitney Strub

  The Sopranos prequel misses the chance to tell a rich story about the ethnic rivalries in Newark's city politics that unfolded in the 1960s.

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• SOURCE: The New Yorker
  11/30/2020
  

  Why New York’s Mob Mythology Endures

  by Adam Gopnik

  "Generally, in Mob stories, the cute bits are not real, and the real bits are not cute. Given that grim truth, there’s something to be said for just shutting your eyes and repeating the cute bits." Some new books on the Mafia unfortunately follow the pattern. 

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• SOURCE: WHYY
  7/24/2020
  

  Philadelphia Historical Commission Votes To Remove Marconi Plaza Christopher Columbus Statue

  Advocates for the statue's removal noted that Columbus has come to sybolize white supremacy, colonialism, and genocide and that there are better figures or stories that exemplify Italian American culture to celebrate.

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• SOURCE: Cleveland Plain Dealer
  6/26/2020
  

  The Rap Against Christopher Columbus Statues Overlooks Their Origins

  by Jonathan Zimmerman

  The great achievement of the 20th-century United States was the integration of formerly excluded ethnics -- Italians, Irish, Jews, and others -- into full citizenship and equality. And the great tragedy was our failure to do the same for nonwhites, especially African Americans and Native Americans.

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• SOURCE: NY Times
  10/12/19
  

  How Italians Became ‘White’

  by Brent Staples

  Italians who had come to the country as “free white persons” were often marked as black because they accepted “black” jobs in the Louisiana sugar fields or because they chose to live among African-Americans.