The Entire History of Italian Migration Into America

Between 1907 and 1911, for every hundred Italians who arrived in America, seventy-three went back. It was never meant to be a migration. America wanted men who would dig the subway tunnels, lay the rail, carry the stone — and then go home again. They were called birds of passage, and some crossed the Atlantic eight or ten times. But the three years became five, the wives came, children were born in Brooklyn tenements and Pennsylvania mining towns, and a labour supply quietly turned into a people. There are around seventeen million Americans of Italian descent today. This is the complete history of Italian immigration to America: why they left the Mezzogiorno, where they settled street by street, what their surnames can tell you, and how to trace a family back to the exact town. In this video: Why Italy had barely existed for twenty years when they left, and why most of them did not think of themselves as Italian. The grist tax, the latifondi, and what unification did to the south. The 1908 Messina earthquake. Garibaldi's years on Staten Island. The Genoese who founded the Bank of Italy — which became Bank of America. Naples, steerage, and what actually happened at Ellis Island. The padrone system. Why two thirds of Italian emigration never came to America at all. Every neighbourhood, from Mulberry Street to Federal Hill to The Hill to Ybor City — and the quarries of Barre, Vermont. The Triangle Shirtwaist fire, where half the victims were Italian. The 1891 New Orleans lynching of eleven Italians, the largest mass lynching in American history — and its strange connection to Columbus Day. Why the 1924 quota cut Italian immigration from 200,000 a year to 3,845. The 600,000 Italians declared enemy aliens in 1942, and why nobody talked about it for fifty years. Why spaghetti and meatballs is an American dish. And the surname carried by hundreds of thousands of Americans that means "left at the door." Chapters 0:00 Seventy-three out of a hundred went home 3:00 Italy barely existed 6:00 Why they left the south 11:00 The Italians who were already here 15:00 California, wine, and the Bank of Italy 18:00 Four million people 21:00 Naples, steerage and Ellis Island 25:00 The padrone 28:00 Birds of passage 32:00 Find your neighbourhood 38:00 The work 42:00 Triangle Shirtwaist 44:00 Were Italians white? 47:00 New Orleans, 1891 51:00 Where Columbus Day came from 53:00 Sacco and Vanzetti 55:00 The door closes, 1924 58:00 Enemy aliens 63:00 The food is American 66:00 The church and the feste 69:00 The stereotype 72:00 Italian surnames 76:00 The foundling names 80:00 Finding the comune 84:00 What DNA can tell you Tell me in the comments: which region did your family come from — Campania, Calabria, Sicily, Abruzzo, Puglia, the north? Do you know the actual town? And if your surname is Esposito, Innocenti or Trovato, say so, because there is a story behind that one. #ItalianAmerican #Genealogy #AmericanHistory #Sicily