Italy in the American Imagination - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook Italy in the American Imagination write by Ian J. Bickerton. This book was released on 2023-10-04. Italy in the American Imagination available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. It is almost impossible to imagine the United States without making reference to Italy. There is scarcely any aspect of American culture untouched by Italy—its history, art, architecture, fashion, film, music, the mafia, or even more viscerally its food. Italy occupies a space of near mythical proportion in the American imagination. When many Americans think of, or dream about and imagine, the good life, how and where they would like to live, they think most often of Italy; the beauty, the life-style, the romance, the excitement and sense of adventure that Italy offers. By looking at the fluid and multi-dimensional imaginative interactions Americans have with Italian culture and society, this comprehensive and robust volume offers a new and novel way of exploring the influence of Italy upon the United States. University of New South Wales historian Ian James Bickerton argues that if we wish to understand the United States, and how Americans define themselves and their nation, it is vital to examine how they imagine themselves, and he demonstrates that throughout U.S. history one of the most powerful stimulants shaping the imaginary world of Americans has been Italy.
America in Italy
America in Italy - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook America in Italy write by Axel Körner. This book was released on 2017-06-13. America in Italy available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. America in Italy examines the influence of the American political experience on the imagination of Italian political thinkers between the late eighteenth century and the unification of Italy in the 1860s. Axel Körner shows how Italian political thought was shaped by debates about the American Revolution and the U.S. Constitution, but he focuses on the important distinction that while European interest in developments across the Atlantic was keen, this attention was not blind admiration. Rather, America became a sounding board for the critical assessment of societal changes at home. Many Italians did not think the United States had lessons to teach them and often concluded that life across the Atlantic was not just different but in many respects also objectionable. In America, utopia and dystopia seemed to live side by side, and Italian references to the United States were frequently in support of progressive or reactionary causes. Political thinkers including Cesare Balbo, Carlo Cattaneo, Giuseppe Mazzini, and Antonio Rosmini used the United States to shed light on the course of their nation's political resurgence. Concepts from Montesquieu, Rousseau, and Vico served to evaluate what Italians discovered about America. Ideas about American "domestic manners" were reflected and conveyed through works of ballet, literature, opera, and satire. Transcending boundaries between intellectual and cultural history, America in Italy is the first book-length examination of the influence of America's political formation on modern Italian political thought.
Feeling Italian
Feeling Italian - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook Feeling Italian write by Thomas J. Ferraro. This book was released on 2005-05. Feeling Italian available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Southern Italian emigration to the United States peaked a full century ago, descendents are now fourth and fifth generation, dispersed from their old industrial neighborhoods, professionalized, and fully integrated into the melting pot. Surely the social historians are right: Italian Americans are fading into the twilight of their ethnicity. So, why is the American imagination enthralled by The Sopranos, and other portraits of Italian-ness?
Built with Faith
Built with Faith - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook Built with Faith write by Joseph Sciorra. This book was released on 2018-05-15. Built with Faith available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Over the course of 130 years, Italian American Catholics in New York City have developed a varied repertoire of devotional art and architecture to create community-based sacred spaces in their homes and neighborhoods. These spaces exist outside of but in relationship to the consecrated halls of local parishes and are sites of worship in conventionally secular locations. Such ethnic building traditions and urban ethnic landscapes have long been neglected by all but a few scholars. Joseph Sciorra’s Built with Faith offers a place-centric, ethnographic study of the religious material culture of New York City’s Italian American Catholics. Sciorra spent thirty-five years researching these community art forms and interviewing Italian immigrant and U.S.-born Catholics. By documenting the folklife of this group, Sciorra reveals how Italian Americans in the city use expressive culture and religious practices to transform everyday urban space into unique, communal sites of ethnically infused religiosity. The folk aesthetics practiced by individuals within their communities are integral to understanding how art is conceptualized, implemented, and esteemed outside of museum and gallery walls. Yard shrines, sidewalk altars, Nativity presepi, Christmas house displays, a stone-studded grotto, and neighborhood processions—often dismissed as kitsch or prized as folk art—all provide examples of the vibrant and varied ways contemporary Italian Americans use material culture, architecture, and public ceremonial display to shape the city’s religious and cultural landscapes. Written in an accessible style that will appeal to general readers and scholars alike, Sciorra’s unique study contributes to our understanding of how value and meaning are reproduced at the confluences of everyday life. Joseph Sciorra is the director of Academic and Cultural Programs at the John D. Calandra Italian American Institute, Queens College. He is the editor of Italian Folk: Vernacular Culture in Italian-American Lives and co-editor of Embroidered Stories: Interpreting Women's Domestic Needlework from the Italian Diaspora.
Power and Imagination
Power and Imagination - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook Power and Imagination write by Lauro Martines. This book was released on 1988-06-22. Power and Imagination available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. In Power and Imagination, a noted historian rethinks the evolution of the city-state in Renaissance Italy and recasts the conventional distinction between "society" and "culture." Martines traces the growth of commerce and the evolution of governments; he describes the attitudes, pleasures, and rituals of the ruling elite; and he seeks to understand the period's towering works of the imagination in literature, painting, city planning, and philosophy-not simply as the creations of individual artists, but as the forman expression of the ambitions and egos of those in power.
