Read Anywhere and on Any Device!

Subscribe to Read | $0.00

Join today and start reading your favorite books for Free!

Create Free Account

From Sicily to Elizabeth Street: Housing and Social Change Among Italian Immigrants, 1880-1930

Donna R. Gabaccia

3.5/5 ( ratings)

From Sicily to Elizabeth Street analyzes the relationship of environment to social behavior. It revises our understanding of the Italian-American family and challenges existing notions of the Italian immigrant experience by comparing everyday family and social life in the agrotowns of Sicily to life in a tenement neighborhood on New York's Lower East Side at the turn of the century.

Moving historical understanding beyond such labels as uprooted and huddled masses, the book depicts the immigrant experience from the perspective of the immigrants themselves. It begins with a uniquely detailed description of the Sicilian backgrounds and moves on to recreate Elizabeth Street in lower Manhattan, a neighborhood inhabited by some 8,200 Italians.

The author shows how the tightly knit conjugal family became less important in New York than in Sicily, while a wider association of kin groups became crucial to community life. Immigrants, who were mostly young people, began to rely more on their related peers for jobs and social activities and less on parents who remained behind.

Interpreting their lives in America, immigrants abandoned some Sicilian ideals, while other customs, though Sicilian in origin, assumed new and distinctive forms as this first generation initiated the process of becoming Italian-American.

Language: English

Pages: 174

Format: Paperback

Publisher: State University of New York Press

Release: June 30, 1984

ISBN: 0873957695

ISBN 13: 9780873957694

From Sicily to Elizabeth Street: Housing and Social Change Among Italian Immigrants, 1880-1930

Donna R. Gabaccia

3.5/5 ( ratings)

From Sicily to Elizabeth Street analyzes the relationship of environment to social behavior. It revises our understanding of the Italian-American family and challenges existing notions of the Italian immigrant experience by comparing everyday family and social life in the agrotowns of Sicily to life in a tenement neighborhood on New York's Lower East Side at the turn of the century.

Moving historical understanding beyond such labels as uprooted and huddled masses, the book depicts the immigrant experience from the perspective of the immigrants themselves. It begins with a uniquely detailed description of the Sicilian backgrounds and moves on to recreate Elizabeth Street in lower Manhattan, a neighborhood inhabited by some 8,200 Italians.

The author shows how the tightly knit conjugal family became less important in New York than in Sicily, while a wider association of kin groups became crucial to community life. Immigrants, who were mostly young people, began to rely more on their related peers for jobs and social activities and less on parents who remained behind.

Interpreting their lives in America, immigrants abandoned some Sicilian ideals, while other customs, though Sicilian in origin, assumed new and distinctive forms as this first generation initiated the process of becoming Italian-American.

Language: English

Pages: 174

Format: Paperback

Publisher: State University of New York Press

Release: June 30, 1984

ISBN: 0873957695

ISBN 13: 9780873957694

More books from Donna R. Gabaccia

We Are What We Eat: Ethnic Food and the Making of Americans

3.6/5 ( ratings)

From the Other Side: Women, Gender, and Immigrant Life in the U.S., 1820-1990

3.6/5 ( ratings)

Italy's Many Diasporas

3.6/5 ( ratings)

American Dreaming, Global Realities: Rethinking U.S. Immigration History

3.8/5 ( ratings)

Immigration and American Diversity: A Social and Cultural History

3.6/5 ( ratings)

Norwegians and Swedes in the United States: Friends and Neighbors

3.3/5 ( ratings)

Deportation in the Americas: Histories of Exclusion and Resistance

Gender and International Migration

3.5/5 ( ratings)

Italian Workers of the World: Labor Migration and the Formation of Multiethnic States

4.5/5 ( ratings)

Borders, Conflict Zones, and Memory: Scholarly Engagements with Luisa Passerini

Gender History Across Epistemologies (Gender and History Special Issues)

Immigrant Women in the United States: A Selectively Annotated Multidisciplinary Bibliography

Emotional Landscapes: Love, Gender, and Migration

Foreign Relations: American Immigration in Global Perspective

Redirecting Ethnic Singularity: Italian Americans and Greek Americans in Conversation

Intimacy and Italian Migration: Gender and Domestic Lives in a Mobile World

The Review of Italian American Studies

Connecting Seas and Connected Ocean Rims: Indian, Atlantic, and Pacific Oceans and China Seas Migrations from the 1830s to the 1930s

Immigrant Life in the Us: Multi-Disciplinary Perspectives

Rate this book!

Write a review?