Italian Voices: Making Minnesota Our Home

Italian Voices was a labor of love for Mary Ellen Mancina-Batinich.The author's father, Vincenzo (who later took the Americanizedname of James), told his daughter many stories about his lifeas an Italian immigrant in Minnesota's Iron Range. These storiesinstilled in Mancina-Batinich a love for her Italian heritage,but perhaps more importantly, a fascination with the lives andstories of other Italian immigrants and their families. Theauthor, who directed an oral history project focusing on Chicago'sItalian-American community, began collecting interviews in thelate 1970s with the men and     

The Italian American Experience In New Haven: Images and Oral Histories

Anthony V. Riccio's lavish new coffee table book, The ItalianAmerican Experience in New Haven: Images and Oral Histories,provides a fascinating look at the experiences of Italian immigrantsand their children in one east coast community. The field ofimmigration history has certainly benefited from the wealthof oral histories collected from immigrants and their descendants.Ranging from Al Santoli's New Americans, an Oral History: Immigrantsand Refugees in the U. S. Today (1988) to works such as La Merica:Images of Italian Greenhorn Experience (1985)     

The Face of Decline: the Pennsylvania Anthracite Region in the Twentieth Century

The term "deindustrialization" did not come into popular usageuntil the late 1970s as American heavy industry went into aprecipitous decline and the industrial heartland became the"rust belt." For the people of the anthracite coal mining regionof eastern Pennsylvania, deindustrialization came much earlieras Thomas Dublin and Walter Licht graphically demonstrate inThe Face of Decline: The Pennsylvania Anthracite Region in theTwentieth Century (2005). This work joins a growing body ofliterature that examines the rise, decline, and fall of communitiesimpacted by the slow erosion of heavy industry. Recent workssuch as Industrial Sunset: The Making of North America's RustBelt (2003) by Steven High,