American Studies Commons^™

Eying Italians: Race, Romance, And Reality In American Perception, 1880--1910, Joseph Peter Cosco

Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects

This dissertation explores how American representations of Italians and Italian Americans engaged, reflected and helped shape the United States' developing concepts of immigration, ethnicity, race, and national identity from 1880 to 1910, when masses of Italian and other "new immigrants" rigorously tested the country's attitudes and powers of assimilation. In a larger sense, the research examines how the process of constructing the modern Italian/Italian American was part of the process of America constructing for itself a modern national identity for a new century.;The dissertation looks at a variety of "texts," including journalism, travel literature, autobiography, fiction, and photographs and illustrations …