Italy And The Usa

This collection takes a cross-disciplinary, transnational approach and gathers together essays from a range of subjects including linguistics, film studies, folk music, oral and written narrative, and history, which provide new comparative perspectives on the questions surrounding the mutual influence between Italian and U.S. cultures. The volume also showcases new research - quantitative, interpretative, and archival - which contributes to the study of cultural contact. It therefore offers new evidence to answer a question which has long been pivotal in various disciplines and research fields (from historical linguistics to cultural anthropology) - namely, how and to what extent cultural contact can affect long-term historical change?

This edited collection offers a new approach to the study of Italy’s foreign policy from the 1960s to the end of the Cold War, highlighting its complex and sometimes ambiguous goals, due to the intricacies of its internal system and delicate position in the fault line of the East-West and North-South divides. According to received opinion, during the Cold War era Italy was more an object rather than a factor in active foreign policy, limiting itself to paying lip service to the Western alliance and the European integration process, without any pretension to exerting a substantial international influence. Eleven contributions by leading Italian historians reappraise Italy’s international role, addressing three complex and intertwined issues, namely, the country’s political-diplomatic dimension; the economic factors affecting Rome’s international stance; and Italy’s role in new approaches to the international system and the influence of political parties’ cultures in the nation’s foreign policy.

The Italian Emigration of Modern Times examines diplomatic issues that arose between Italy and the United States over a series of lynchings of Italian immigrant labourers before World War I. The work explores a significant epoch in Italian economic and diplomatic history which became intertwined with American ethnic and race relations issues. On one level, the book emphasises the pragmatism and restraint which characterized Italy’s official reactions to these repeated episodes of murder of its nationals. On another level, it shows that the diplomatic crises which swirled around the lynching of Italians pushed onto the American political scene the question of whether there should be a federal anti-lynching law. Naturally, the lynching of Italian nationals in the US produced wide public outrage in Italy. Italian domestic outcries presented the Italian government with a serious dilemma. Emigrant savings and financial transfers to family members remaining in Italy were an important economic asset. Italian diplomats launched investigations and protested vigorously, but ended up accepting federal financial compensation for the victims’ families. The consistent pragmatism and restraint of the Italian government through these episodes of violence is the unifying theme of the entire work.

This cinema history illuminates the role of southern Italian performance traditions on American movies from the silent era to contemporary film. In Napoli/New York/Hollywood, Italian cinema historian Giuliana Muscio investigates the significant influence of Italian immigrant actors, musicians, and directors on Hollywood cinema. Using a provocative interdisciplinary approach, Muscio demonstrates how these artists and workers preserved their cultural and performance traditions, which led to innovations in the mode of production and in the use of media technologies. In doing so, she sheds light on the work of generations of artists, as well as the cultural evolution of “Italian-ness” in America over the past century. Muscio examines the careers of Italian performers steeped in an Italian theatrical culture that embraced high and low, tragedy and comedy, music, dance, 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.

Throughout the Cold War, the United States encountered unexpected challenges from Italy and France, two countries with the strongest, and determinedly most anti-American, Communist Parties in Western Europe. Based primarily on new evidence from communist archives in France and Italy, as well as research archives in the United States, Alessandro Brogi's original study reveals how the United States was forced by political opposition within these two core Western countries to reassess its own anticommunist strategies, its image, and the general meaning of American liberal capitalist culture and ideology. Brogi shows that the resistance to Americanization was a critical test for the French and Italian communists' own legitimacy and existence. Their anti-Americanism was mostly dogmatic and driven by the Soviet Union, but it was also, at crucial times, subtle and ambivalent, nurturing fascination with the American culture of dissent. The staunchly anticommunist United States, Brogi argues, found a successful balance to fighting the communist threat in France and Italy by employing diplomacy and fostering instances of mild dissent in both countries. Ultimately, both the French and Italian communists failed to adapt to the forces of modernization that stemmed both from indigenous factors and from American influence. Confronting America illuminates the political, diplomatic, economic, and cultural conflicts behind the U.S.-communist confrontation.

When the first edition of this book was published, the Christian ScienceMonitor called it "one of the mostconcise and informative books toappear on Italy since the end of Fascism." Thoroughly revised and updated, this third edition insures thatProfessor Hughes' work will retain itspreeminence as the best single introduction to contemporary Italy. Professor Hughes outlines the geographic, economic, and psychological factors that have conditionedItaly's development, and reviews thetraditional contacts between Italy andthe United States, in particular theimmigration of Italians to this country. The chapters on Italy's historicaldevelopment interpret the trends andforces--the "legacy" of Fascism,anti-Fascism, the Second WorldWar--that still affect Italy today.Hughes' treatment of Italy's cultural,economic, and international status issuccinct and stimulating. Two new chapters have been added for this third edition, dealing with the problems produced by the country's rapid industrial growth. The first situates the new Italy in its ecological and social context, delineating the stresses that have resulted from rapid change, among them political terrorism and the protest movements of women and of youth. The second assesses the transformation of Italian public life that the leading Eurocommunist party in the Westernworld has brought about.