Italian Americans
ethnic group; Americans of Italian ancestry
Italian Americans (Italian: italoamericani [ˌitaloameriˈkaːni]) are Americans who have full or partial Italian ancestry. The largest concentrations of Italian Americans are in the urban Northeast and industrial Midwestern metropolitan areas, with significant communities also residing in many other major U.S. metropolitan areas.
Between 1820 and 2004, approximately 5.5 million Italians migrated to the United States during the Italian diaspora, in several distinct waves, with the greatest number arriving in the 20th century from Southern Italy. Initially, most single men, so-called birds of passage, sent remittance back to their families in Italy and then returned to Italy.
Immigration began to increase during the 1880s, when more than twice as many Italians immigrated than had in the five previous decades combined. From 1880 to the outbreak of World War I in 1914, the greatest surge of immigration brought more than 4 million Italians to the United States. The largest number of this wave came from Southern Italy, which at that time was largely agricultural and where much of the populace had been impoverished by centuries of foreign rule and disproportionately affected by taxes implemented by the recently unified Kingdom of Italy. In the 1920s, 455,315 more immigrants arrived. Many of them came under the terms of the new quota-based immigration restrictions created by the Immigration Act of 1924.
Italian-Americans have had a significant influence on American culture, making numerous contributions to visual arts, literature, cuisine, politics, sports, science, scholarship, and music.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Italian Americans” is ethnic group; Americans of Italian ancestry. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Italian, Americans and ethnic, not as a finished interpretation.
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This entry incorporates text from “Italian Americans” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.