Italian American Material Culture

With a growing interest in ethnicity, there has also been an increasing interest in the study of material culture, as a means of explicating traditional and popular culture. Moreover, the decades leading up to the Columbian Quincentenary have been marked by the establishment of new Italian American museums, cultural centers, and archival collections. This timely publication, the fourth in Greenwood's series of Material Culture Directories, complements existing Italian American and Italian Canadian bibliographies and guides to collections by focusing on material culture and photographic collections, historic sites, and festivals.

Following an introductory overview, chapter 1 provides information on objects, photographics images, and, in a few cases, oral histories held by museums and other repositories in the United States and Canada. Chapter 2 lists churches, houses, commercial buildings, wineries, monuments, a few towns and neighborhoods, and other sites associated with Italian American history. Entries range from Manhattan's Casa Italiana to the Italian Rock ovens in Washington State. Chapter 3 covers over 100 religious feasts and secular festivals in which material culture or foodways play an important part in the lives of Italian Americans. Each chapter is arranged alphabetically by geographic location. The work concludes with a selected bibliography and name and subject indexes.

MARGARET HOBBIE is Director of the DeWitt Historical Society of Tompkins County in Ithaca, New York. She is also the author of Museums, Sites, and Collections of Germanic Culture in North America (Greenwood, 1980).