Una Storia Segreta brings a new perspective to the history of wartime violations of civilian populations. The essays in this volume bring together the voices of the Italian American community and experts in the field, including personal stories by survivors and their children, letters from internment camps, news clips, photographs, and cartoons.

This is one of Le Fanu's earlier stories. Set in Ireland, it is written as though le Fanu was a priest named Purcell, it contains all the ingredients of the classic Gothic horror story. The countess is known only as Countess D. All we know about her at first is that her family and the family into which she married, are now entirely extinct.

When the United States entered World War II, Italian nationals living in this country were declared enemy aliens and faced with legal restrictions. Several thousand aliens and a few U.S. citizens were arrested and underwent flawed hearings, and hundreds were interned. Shedding new light on an injustice often overshadowed by the mass confinement of Japanese Americans, Mary Elizabeth Basile Chopas traces how government and military leaders constructed wartime policies affecting Italian residents. Based on new archival research into the alien enemy hearings, this in-depth legal analysis illuminates a process not widely understood. From presumptive guilt in the arrest and internment based on membership in social and political organizations, to hurdles in attaining American citizenship, Chopas uncovers many layers of repression not heretofore revealed in scholarship about the World War II home front. In telling the stories of former internees and persons excluded from military zones as they attempted to resume their lives after the war, Chopas demonstrates the lasting social and cultural effects of government policies on the Italian American community, and addresses the modern problem of identifying threats in a largely loyal and peaceful population.

This book details the Italian immigrant experience in San Francisco from the Gold Rush to the Mayoralty of George Moscone - which is to say the entire life cycle of the Italian community - and defines the concept of community in a way never seen before.

Napoli/New York/Hollywood is an absorbing investigation of the significant impact that Italian immigrant actors, musicians, and directors—and the southern Italian stage traditions they embodied—have had on the history of Hollywood cinema and American media, from 1895 to the present day. In a unique exploration of the transnational communication between American and Italian film industries, media or performing arts as practiced in Naples, New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, this groundbreaking book looks at the historical context and institutional film history from the illuminating perspective of the performers themselves—the workers who lend their bodies and their performance culture to screen representations. In doing so, the author brings to light the cultural work of families and generations of artists that have contributed not only to American film culture, but also to the cultural construction and evolution of “Italian-ness” over the past century. Napoli/New York/Hollywood offers a major contribution to our understanding of the role of southern Italian culture in American cinema, from the silent era to contemporary film. Using a provocative interdisciplinary approach, the author associates southern Italian culture with modernity and the immigrants’ preservation of cultural traditions with innovations in the mode of production and in the use of media technologies (theatrical venues, music records, radio, ethnic films). Each chapter synthesizes a wealth of previously under-studied material and displays the author’s exceptional ability to cover transnational cinematic issues within an historical context. For example, her analysis of the period from the end of World War I until the beginning of sound in film production in the end of the 1920s, delivers a meaningful revision of the relationship between Fascism and American cinema, and Italian emigration. Napoli/New York/Hollywood examines the careers of those Italian performers who were Italian not only because of their origins but because their theatrical culture was Italian, a culture that embraced high and low, tragedy and comedy, music, dance and even acrobatics, naturalism, and improvisation. Their previously unexplored story—that of the Italian diaspora’s influence on American cinema—is here meticulously reconstructed through rich primary sources, deep archival research, extensive film analysis, and an enlightening series of interviews with heirs to these traditions, including Francis Coppola and his sister Talia Shire, John Turturro, Nancy Savoca, James Gandolfini, David Chase, Joe Dante, and Annabella Sciorra.

This dazzling collection of original essays from some of the country's leading thinkers asks the rather intriguing question - Are Italians White? Each piece carefully explores how, when and why whiteness became important to Italian Americans, and the significance of gender, class and nation to racial identity.

Presenting sociological as well as historical perspectives, this book supplies readers with a fascinating, unprecedented look at the most successful organized-crime family they've probably never heard of. From the 1920s until the early 21st century, one Sicilian mob family defied everyone from the California attorney general to J. Edgar Hoover to chart their own American Dream. Unlike their flashier rivals in New York and Chicago who met their end by the knife, the bullet, or a judge's gavel, this crime family prospered and grew alongside their adopted home of San Francisco. This book tells how they did it. Readers will learn how the Lanzas managed to retain control of their patch from the end of Prohibition through the Summer of Love and into the beginnings of the dot-com era, gaining insight into not only what the west-coast branch of the Mob did, but also why they did it. The documentation of how this mostly unknown crime syndicate formed, evolved, and eventually folded is set against the backdrop of the city of San Francisco transforming itself from a gritty port and manufacturing hub dominated by Italian- and Irish-Americans into the multicultural intellectual and services capital it is today.