Overview

With a growing interest in ethnicity, there has also been an increasing interest in the study of material culture, as a means of explicating traditional and popular culture. Moreover, the decades leading up to the Columbian Quincentenary have been marked by the establishment of new Italian American museums, cultural centers, and archival collections. This timely publication, the fourth in Greenwood's series of Material Culture Directories, complements existing Italian American and Italian Canadian bibliographies and guides to collections by focusing on material culture and photographic collections, historic sites, and festivals. Following an introductory overview, chapter 1 provides information on objects, photographics images, and, in a few cases, oral histories held by museums and other repositories in the United States and Canada. Chapter 2 lists churches, houses, commercial buildings, wineries, monuments, a few towns and neighborhoods, and other sites associated with Italian American history. Entries range from Manhattan's Casa Italiana to the Italian Rock ovens in Washington State. Chapter 3 covers over 100 religious feasts and secular festivals in which material culture or foodways play an important part in the lives of Italian Americans. Each chapter is arranged alphabetically by geographic location. The work concludes with a selected bibliography and name and subject indexes.

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9780313272004

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Reviews

?Provides information about Italian cultural collections, sites of Italian culture, and feasts and festivals. The first part lists and describes 97 collections, which include books, photographic materials, journals, public records, news stories, and documents. These collections are in museums, local history societies, and libraries. The second section lists sites, primarily of churches, but also of Italian neighborhoods with characteristic ornamentation and landscaping. Although mostly located in the Northeast, they can be found throughout North America. Part 3 lists feasts and festivals. The author carefully describes the festivals and the date and the location. Each festival is different and the spirit of these events is skillfully conveyed to the reader. There is a good bibliography, a name index, and a subject index. The preface and introduction provide the reader with information about the development of Italian archival collections. Students of sociology, history, and ethnic studies will find the book valuable.?-Choice

Author Information

MARGARET HOBBIE is Director of the DeWitt Historical Society of Tompkins County in Ithaca, New York. She is also the author of Museums, Sites, and Collections of Germanic Culture in North America (Greenwood, 1980).

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