The Italian American Experience in New Haven
Images and Oral Histories
A compelling social history of a vibrant immigrant community, told through interviews and photographs.
Description
Using interviews and photographs, Anthony Riccio provides a vital supplement to our understanding of the Italian immigrant experience in the United States. In conversations around kitchen tables and in social clubs, members of New Haven's Italian American community evoke the rhythms of the streets and the pulse of life in the old ethnic neighborhoods. They describe the events that shaped the twentieth century—the Spanish Flu pandemic, the Great Depression, and World War II—along with the private histories of immigrant women who toiled under terrible working conditions in New Haven's shirt factories, who sacrificed dreams of education and careers for the economic well-being of their families. This is a compelling social, cultural, and political history of a vibrant immigrant community.
Anthony V. Riccio is Stacks Manager at the Sterling Memorial Library at Yale University. He is the author of Portrait of an Italian-American Neighborhood: The North End of Boston.