PRIMO Magazine Review of Drone Strike

A great thriller rises on the shoulders of its main character. He must carry the novel by being clever, worldly, and above all else, likable. These are the attributes of Anthony Provati, the 34-year-old Italian American protagonist in Joe Giordano’s excellent new novel – Drone Strike. Fans of the author know Anthony Provati well. Giordano…

New York to Correct Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge Misspelling

After fifty-four years, the misspelling of Italian explorer, Giovanni da Verrazzano’s name will be corrected on the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge spanning Staten Island and Brooklyn through legislation signed by Governor Andrew Cuomo. Following Christopher Columbus’s discovery of the new world and the return of the Magellan expedition after circumnavigating the globe, Verrazzano was commissioned by the…

The 1911 Dillingham Immigration Commission Report

In 1911, the Dillingham Commission, consisting of bipartisan, U.S. House of Representatives and Senate members, produced a forty-one-volume report on immigration in the Unites States warning that the influx from Southern (overwhelmingly Italians) and Eastern Europe threatened America’s way of life and should be drastically reduced. The Commission’s conclusions provided the bases for immigration quota…

Christopher Columbus: Entrepreneur

Like a modern entrepreneur, fifteenth-century explorer, Christopher Columbus, raised capital for an expedition to discover a western passage to Asia. The fall of Constantinople in 1453 placed control of the land routes to the lucrative Asian spice trade in Ottoman-Turk hands. Columbus first proposed the Atlantic Ocean route to Joao II of Portugal in 1485.…