[Review of] Francesco Cordasco (Ed.), Italian Americans: A Guide to Information Sources

The great proliferation of knowledge that has caused a problem of control and retrieval of that knowledge has caught up with the expanding field of research in ethnic-immigration history. Francesco Cordasco’s newly edited work, Italian Americans: A Guide to Information Sources, therefore is a major contribution in the field. The student of ethnic-immigration history and the related social sciences will find it a useful tool because it is the most comprehensive up-to-date bibliographical register on the Italian Americans. The book is Volume 2 in Gale\u27s Ethnic Studies Information Guide Series dealing with ethnic groups in the United States

[Review of] The Immigrants Speak: Italian Immigrants Tell Their Story by Salvatore J. LaGumina

In The Immigrants Speak, Italian Americans Tell Their Story LaGumina has fashioned fourteen personal life histories that include miners, shoemakers, a poet, an artist, theater people, a social worker, a soldier, a lawyer and an entrepreneur. Through their recollections they have increased our understanding of the Italian American experience. Their stories. told in the first person, both dramatize and illuminate the role of ethnicity in the twentieth century. As LaGumina states, “These stories detail the lives of a people bridging two cultures in modern history.

Critique [of Fascism: A Review of Its History and Its Present Cultural Reality in the Americas]

Writing from the vantage point of the 1980s, white historians have questioned the earlier simplistic interpretations of Jeffersonian and Jacksonian Democracy. Certainly that “democracy” excluded blacks, Indians, women, and the poor, since it was modeled on the ancient Athenian system. It is clear that these and other evils were compromised and were not resolved to the complete satisfaction of the masses. For example, though the Civil War produced the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth amendments white Americans devised other systems to keep blacks in an inferior position

[Review of] Virginia Vans-McLaughlin, Family and Community, Italian Immigrants in Buffalo, 1880-1930

Virginia Yans-McLaughlin has made a major contribution to the study of ethnic immigration history, in general, and to the existing knowledge of the Italian Americans, in particular. In Family and Community, Italian Immigrants in Buffalo, 1880—1930, she explores the relationship between the social and economic roots of the contadini from the Italian mezzogiorno and their life in urban industrial America

[Review of] John Cooke (Ed.). Perspectives on Ethnicity in New Orleans.

In Perspectives on Ethnicity in New Orleans, editor John Cooke has organized nine essays that respond to the meaning of and the durability of ethnicity. A practical and analytical work, the collection focuses on the community, the people and the culture of New Orleans