Enemy Aliens: Italian-American Internment During WWII Sponsored by the Italian Genealogical Group Webinar presented by JOE GIORDANO, Saturday, April 8, 2023 Buona Pasqua. Thanks for having me and asking me to speak about a troubling time: the internment of Italians by the United States government during World War II. I’ll make a short introduction to…
DetailsAfter 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…
DetailsIn 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…
DetailsLike 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.…
DetailsAfter Italy’s 1870 consolidation, il Risorgimento, the great wave of Italian immigration began. Italy had formed a common government, but not a nation. As one statesman put it, “Italy has been made. Now we must make Italians.” The south of Italy, the Mezzogiorno, spoke different languages, had been dominated for centuries by foreign powers, and…
DetailsThe story of Italians in Arkansas started in Greenwich Village, New York. Following il Risorgimento, the unification of Italy, southern Italians fled poverty in the Mezzogiorno emigrating to seek better opportunities in New York. The surge of peasant Italians often fell prey to exploitation. In 1890, Father Pietro Bandini left Italy and founded the St.…
DetailsCompleted in 1825, the Erie Canal opened transportation for immigrants to the U.S. Midwest. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Wisconsin expanded from a frontier territory into a fully functioning state (1848) mainly due to migration and immigration, the majority arriving from northern Europe and Germany, with a smaller number coming from southern…
DetailsIn the early 1700s, Neapolitan born, Henri de (Enrico) Tonti, a colleague of Robert de la Salle, explored Louisiana and settled in the New France colony. A leader in the community, North Tonti Street in New Orleans honors him and is located just south of Lake Pontchartrain. After the Civil War, planters in southern states…
DetailsLike Christopher Columbus, Italians were often in the employ of the Spanish court during the era of discovery. On Francisco Vasquez de Coronado’s 1540-42 epic expedition from Mexico to Kansas, later termed the search for the “Seven Cities of Gold,” his soldiers included men named Loro, Napolitano, and Romano. Neapolitan, Henri di Tonti, was an…
DetailsAfter gold was discovered in 1849, the first Italian immigrants left northern Italy, and settled in the Mother Lode near Sacramento. Domenico Ghirardelli was a Genoa confectioner’s apprentice. He arrived in California during the Gold Rush and opened a general store for miners. Eventually, his chocolate making operations occupied what is now Ghirardelli Square. Andrea…
Details
