Passage to Liberty: The Story of Italian Immigration and the Rebirth of America - Hardcover

Ciongoli, Ken; Parini, Jay

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0060089024 ISBN 13: 9780060089023

Publisher: William Morrow, 2002

Synopsis

Passage to Liberty recaptures the drama of the 19th and 20th century immigration to America through photos, letters, and other artifacts -- uniquely replicated in three-dimensional facsimile form. In the tradition of Lest We Forget, Chronicle's bestselling interactive tour through the African American experience, the text uses the stories of individuals and families -- from early explorers, through the wave of 19th century impoverished families, to contemporary figures -- to recapture the rich heritage the Italian people carried with them over the waves, and planted anew in the American soil.

Among the topics covered here are:

• The roots of American democracy in Roman history
• The migration of 15 million Italians, 1880-1920
• Catholicism in Italian-American culture
• Food, music, and other Italian cultural traditions
• The Mafia: myth and reality
• Cultural icons: DiMaggio, Sinatra, Madonna & more

As vibrant and packed full of history as previous volumes in this extraordinary series, Passage to Liberty is a splendid and loving tribute to the Italian-American experience.

About this title

About the Author:

A. Kenneth Ciongoli is a trained neurologist with a passion for Italian American history. He is the past president of the National Italian American Foundation, and is listed in Who’s Who in American Medicine, and among the Top 100 Italian “movers and shakers” in Italia magazine.

Longtime friends, Jay Parini and Ken Ciongoli cowrote Beyond the Godfather: Italian American Writers on the Real Italian American Experience.

Michael Hoffman is a filmmaker known for creating complex and layered stories with great attention to detail and character. A skilled writer and director, he has worked on both feature films and documentaries, including A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Emperor's Club, Game of Six, and the ESPN documentary Out of the Blue. The Last Station is his most recent film.

Jay Parini is a professor of English & Creative Writing at Middlebury College in Vermont. A writer and academic, he is best known for his novels and poetry. He is the author of the novel The Last Station, which is now a major motion picture from Sony Classics.

From Publishers Weekly:

In this slim though surprisingly informative illustrated homage to the Italian-American experience, Ciongoli and Parini (coeditors of Beyond the Godfather) begin their history with the history of America. While the authors mention the great Italian explorers Amerigo Vespucci, Cristoforo Colombo, Giovanni Caboto (John Cabot) and Giovanni da Verrazano they focus on the Italians who, alongside George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, inspired the shaping of America: Cesar Rodney and William Paca were two Italians who signed the Declaration of Independence; Jefferson borrowed a phrase from his friend Filipo Mazzei, an Italian wine merchant and surgeon ("All men are by nature equally free and independent"). Ciongoli and Parini delve into the great wave of Italian immigration that began in the late 19th century, exploring everything from conditions in Italy to the Italian assimilation in the U.S. under such chapters as "Saints of the Immigrants" and "Little Italies." One chapter, "Hostility and Hangings," describes anti-Italian crime in the U.S., while a chapter on the Mafia explains that while "70% of [Americans in 1977] polled associated the word `Italian' with the word `crime,' " only .ooo2% of Italian-Americans have ever been members of organized crime. This handsomely composed book with color illustrations and black-and-white photos also contains pullouts of authentically replicated documents, such as an Italian prayer card, a letter from Jefferson to Mazzei and a letter from Nicola Sacco written to his family nine days before he and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were executed.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: William Morrow
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0060089024
• ISBN 13: 9780060089023
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 32