Collection: Queens College : James J. Periconi Collection of Italian-language American imprints
Description: This project entails digitizing and publishing 295 public domain items from the James J. Periconi Collection of Italian-language American imprints. For some of these items, Queens College holds the only copy listed in WorldCat. The collection is a unique resource that offers insight into what Italian immigrants to the United States were reading, writing, and thinking about at the end of the 19th and first half of the 20th centuries, as they fled poverty, social turmoil, and natural disasters in their home country. The collection is primarily comprised of books and periodicals, with smaller quantities of ephemeral documents. Overall, the collection provides a broad and representative sample of a once thriving Italian-language American publishing industry that flourished in the U.S.
Many of the volumes in this collection were cheaply printed, reflecting their mass-market audience, passed through multiple hands (thus having a low survival rate) and have not been widely preserved. Overall, the collection includes instructional booklets, almanacs, grammars, guides, popular literature, poetry, and music, and political tracts ranging from anarchist and socialist to anti and pro-fascist.