The Italians who Built Toronto

The Italians who Built Toronto
Author: Stefano Agnoletto
Publisher: Trade Unions. Past, Present and Future
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2014
Genre: Construction industry
ISBN: 9783034317733

After World War II, hundreds of thousands of Italians emigrated to Toronto. This book describes their labour, business, social and cultural history as they settled in their new home. It addresses fundamental issues that impacted both them and the city, including ethnic economic niching, unionization, urban proletarianization and migrants' entrepreneurship. In addressing these issues the book focuses on the role played by a specific economic sector in enabling immigrants to find their place in their new host society. More specifically, this study looks at the residential sector of the construction industry that, between the 1950s and the 1970s, represented a typical economic ethnic niche for newly arrived Italians. In fact, tens of thousands of Italian men found work in this sector as labourers, bricklayers, carpenters, plasterers and cement finishers, while hundreds of others became contractors, subcontractors or small employers in the same industry. This book is about these real people. It gives voice to a community formed both by entrepreneurial subcontractors who created companies out of nothing and a large group of exploited workers who fought successfully for their rights. In this book you will find stories of inventiveness and hope as well as of oppression and despair. The purpose is to offer an original approach to issues arising from the economic and social history of twentieth-century mass migrations.

From Sojourners to Citizens

From Sojourners to Citizens
Author: Adriana Davies
Publisher: Guernica World Editions
Total Pages: 100
Release: 2021-05
Genre:
ISBN: 9781771836548

From Sojourners to Citizens: Alberta's Italian History brings to life the untold story of Italian immigrants in Alberta from the 1880s to the present. It places them in the narrative of province building from work on railways, mines and other industries to breaking the land for agriculture. Oral history excerpts allow the men, women and children to speak for themselves. What emerges is an unquenchable desire to make good, and overcome intolerable working conditions and discrimination, which culminated with enemy alien designation and internment during the Second World War. The book also provides an exploration of the impact of Government of Canada's multicultural policy on the process of assimilation for the post-war influx of immigrants. It offers a prototype of an immigrant community's movement from marginalization to the mainstream.

Such Hardworking People

Such Hardworking People
Author: Franca Iacovetta
Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
Total Pages: 342
Release: 1992
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780773511453

Such Hardworking People provides a perceptive description of the working-class experiences of immigrants who came to Toronto from southern Italy between 1946 and 1965. Franca Iacovetta focuses on the relations between newly arrived workers and their families, showing that the Italians who came to Toronto during this period were predominantly young, healthy women and men eager to obtain jobs and prepared to make sacrifices in order to secure a more comfortable life for themselves and their children.

How the Italians Created Canada

How the Italians Created Canada
Author: Josie Di Sciascio-Andrews
Publisher: Dragon Hill Publishing
Total Pages: 244
Release: 2007
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN:

From the moment explorer Giovanni Caboto stepped onto Canadian soil, Italians have left their footprints on Canadian history. In the 1700s, Italians including Alphonse and Henri de Tonti came to New France to trade with the Natives and settle the vast land. In the 1800s, Italian workers built the foundation for railways and highways into Canada's northern forests. Today, Little Italy is a part of every major Canadian city. The Italian-Canadian vote is even credited with helping keep Canada together in Québec's sovereignty referendum.

Italians in Toronto

Italians in Toronto
Author: John E. Zucchi
Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
Total Pages: 284
Release: 1990
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780773507821

Italians in Toronto provides an insightful account of how village and regional groups transplanted their communities into the city that is now one of the largest expatriate centres for Italians in the world. The history of Italian migration to Canada is

The Beautiful Country

The Beautiful Country
Author: Stephanie Malia Hom
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Total Pages: 328
Release: 2015-01-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1442648724

Every year, Italy swells with millions of tourists who infuse the economy with billions of dollars and almost outnumber Italians themselves. In fact, Italy has been a model tourist destination for longer than it has been a modern state.The Beautiful Country explores the enduring popularity of “destination Italy,” and its role in the development of the global mass tourism industry. Stephanie Malia Hom tracks the evolution of this particular touristic imaginary through texts, practices, and spaces, beginning with the guidebooks that frame Italy as an idealized land of leisure and finishing with destination Italy's replication around the world. Today, more tourists encounter Italy through places like Las Vegas's The Venetian Hotel and Casino or Dubai's Mercato shopping mall than experience the country in Italy itself. Using an interdisciplinary methodology that includes archival research, ethnographic fieldwork, literary criticism, and spatial analysis,The Beautiful Country reveals destination Italy's paramount role in the creation of modern mass tourism.

Italy Revisited

Italy Revisited
Author: Mary Melfi
Publisher: Guernica Editions
Total Pages: 338
Release: 2009
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN:

Drawing out her mother's childhood memories of life in southern Italy at the dawn of the twentieth century, Mary Melfi takes an unconventional approach to autobiographical writing. Italy Revisited serves as a double memoir, told in dialogue between a mother and a daughter. The conversation takes the reader to a medieval town high up in the mountains where time is told by the shadow the sun casts, where wheat and olive oil are the currency of choice (barter is in use), and where marriage is as much about property as it is about love. As they re-create that vanished world, the pair finds greater understanding of the tumultuous relationships that sometimes exist between immigrant mothers and their children.

The Italian Americans: A History

The Italian Americans: A History
Author: Maria Laurino
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Total Pages: 498
Release: 2014-12-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 0393241963

This richly researched, beautifully illustrated volume illuminates an important, overlooked part of American history. From extensive archival materials and interviews with well-known Italian Americans, Maria Laurino strips away stereotypes and nostalgia to tell the complicated, centuries-long story of the true Italian-American experience. Looking beyond the familiar Little Italys and stereotypes fostered by The Godfather and The Sopranos, Laurino reveals surprising, fascinating lives: Italian-Americans working on sugar-cane plantations in Louisiana to those who were lynched in New Orleans; the banker who helped rebuild San Francisco after the great earthquake; families interned as “enemy aliens” in World War II. From anarchist radicals to “Rosie the Riveter” to Nancy Pelosi, Andrew Cuomo, and Bill de Blasio; from traditional artisans to rebel songsters like Frank Sinatra, Dion, Madonna, and Lady Gaga, this book is both exploration and celebration of the rich legacy of Italian-American life. Readers can discover the history chronologically, chapter by chapter, or serendipitously by exploring the trove of supplemental materials. These include interviews, newspaper clippings, period documents, and photographs that bring the history to life.

The Fishing Net and the Spider Web

The Fishing Net and the Spider Web
Author: Claudio Fogu
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 302
Release: 2020-11-23
Genre: History
ISBN: 3030598578

This book explores the role of Mediterranean imaginaries in one of the preeminent tropes of Italian history: the formation or 'making of' Italians. While previous scholarship on the construction of Italian identity has often focused too narrowly on the territorial notion of the nation-state, and over-identified Italy with its capital, Rome, this book highlights the importance of the Mediterranean Sea to the development of Italian collective imaginaries. From this perspective, this book re-interprets key historical processes and actors in the history of modern Italy, and thereby challenges mainstream interpretations of Italian collective identity as weak or incomplete. Ultimately, it argues that Mediterranean imaginaries acted as counterweights to the solidification of a 'national' Italian identity, and still constitute alternative but equally viable modes of collective belonging.

The Italian Mission

The Italian Mission
Author: Lorenzo Snow
Publisher:
Total Pages: 46
Release: 1851
Genre: Latter Day Saint churches
ISBN:

Letters to his family relating his mission experience.