By: Annie Tummino, Head of Special Collections & Archives
Thanks to generous funding from the Metropolitan New York Library Council (METRO), 295 public domain items from the James J. Periconi Collection of Italian-language American imprints are now available on JSTOR. Housed in the Rosenthal Library’s Special Collections and Archives, the collection 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. For some of these items, Queens College holds the only copy listed in WorldCat, a global catalog of library material. The collection is composed primarily of books, periodicals, and pamphlets, though there are also musical scores, posters, and circulars. Political tracts run the gamut from anarchist and socialist to anti and pro-fascist. Overall, the collection provides a broad and representative sample of a once thriving Italian-language publishing industry that flourished in the United States.
We hope you enjoy browsing the collection! For more information, email qc.archives@qc.cuny.edu.
Item from the collection: Il Proletario [The Worker]. Chicago: Industrial Workers of the World, 1923-1924.