It is probably impossible to measure the far-reaching effect Italian-American women have had on community and culture. Italian women of yesterday have enriched modern life in Italy and America through their expertise in academics, arts, and humanitarian work. Today, their influence continues in an ever-increasing array of fields. Within the pages of Italian-American Women of Chicagoland, the lives of Italian-American women, past and present, come to life. Their stories have laid a foundation for generations to come. The story of Maria Agnesi is one of a child genius who changed the course of mathematics. Italian-born Frances Xavier Cabrini came to America and built health care facilities in Chicago and across the nation. She was later sainted by the Catholic Church for her work. The first woman in Italy to attend the University of Rome and receive a medical degree, Maria Montessori was prominent in finding a new way to educate children. Internationally, Montessori schools flourish to this day.

Karen Tintori thought she knew her family tree. Her grandmother Josie had emigrated from Sicily with her parents at the turn of the century. They settled in Detroit, and with Josie's nine siblings, worked to create a home for themselves away from the poverty and servitude of the old country. Their descendants were proud Italian-Americans. But Josie had a sister nobody spoke of. Her name was Frances, and at age sixteen she fell in love with a young barber. Her father wanted her to marry an older don in the neighborhood mafia---a marriage that would give his sons a leg up in the mob. But Frances eloped with her barber, and when she returned home a married woman, her fate was sealed. Even eighty years and two generations later, Frances was not spoken of, and her memory was suppressed. Unto the Daughters is a historical mystery and family story that unwraps the many layers of family, honor, memory, and fear to find an honor killing in turn-of-the-century Detroit. Tracing the history and insular world of Italian immigrants back to the old country, Karen Tintori shows what they came from, what they hoped for, and how the hopes and dreams of America fell far short for her great-aunt Frances. "Nearly every family has a skeleton in its closet, an ancestor who "sins" against custom and tradition and pays a double price -- ostracism or worse at the time, and obliteration from the memory of succeeding generations. Few of these transgressors paid a higher price than Frances Costa, who was brutally murdered by her own brothers in a 1919 Sicilian honor killing in Detroit. And fewer yet have had a more tenacious successor than Frances's great-niece, Karen Tintori, who refused to allow the truth to remain forgotten. This is a book for anyone who shares the convinction that all history, in the end, is family history." -Frank Viviano, author of Blood Washes Blood and Dispatches from the Pacific Century "Switching back and forth between rural Sicily and early 20th century Detroit, Unto the Daughters reads like a nonfiction version of the film Godfather II--if it had been told from the point of view of a female Corleone. In exploring her own family's secret history, Karen Tintori gives voice not just to her victimized aunt but to all Italian-American daughters and wives silenced by the power of omerta. Half gripping true-crime story, half moving family memoir, Unto the Daughters is both fascinating and frightening, packed with telling details and obscure folklore that help bring the suffocating world of a Mafia family to life." --Eleni N. Gage, author of North of Ithaka

Reconstructing Italians in Chicago is an Anthology based on presentations given at the May 2008 Conference of the same name at Casa Italia Chicago. It is dedicated the Professor Rudlph Vecoli and it contains works by over thirty authors from different disciplines on the subject of Italians in Chicago.There is something for everybody in this eclectic volume. Every reader will find a topic or a writer that s/he wants to know more about. Publication of Reconstructing Italians in Chicago Compiled and edited by Dominic Candeloro and Fred L.Gardaphe' is a major step toward making Chicago's Italians the best documented (and best understood) in the nation. The writers represented in this Anthology include: Leonard Amari, Michael Antonucci, Tony Ardizzone, Robert Benedetti, Adria Bernardi, Dominic Candeloro, Kathy Catrombone and Ellen Shubart, Paolo Ciminello, Jerry Colangelo, David Cowan and John Kuenster, Bill Dal Cerro, Lisi Cipriani, Peter D'Agostino, Fr. Gino Dalpiaz, Tina DeRosa, Annette Dixon, Chickie Farella, Anthony Fornelli, Fred Gardaphe' Thomas Guglielmo, Billy Lombardo, Calogero Lombardo, Robert Lombardo, Ernesto R Milani, Rose Ann Rabiola Miele, Gloria Nardini, Daniel Niemiec, Gianna Panofsky and Eugene Miller, Peter Pero, Tony Romano, Vince Romano, Judy Santacaterina, Giovanni Schiavo, Anthony Sorrentino, Rudolph Vecoli, and Peter Venturelli.

A colorful ethnography of an Italian ladies' club, this book explores the historical and linguistic importance of the women's language and behavior.

Italian Women in Black Dresses reads like a memoir, detailing the life of a family across generations and giving us a moving and haunting portrait of the Italian mother who is the center around which this family revolves. The mother's stories and words shape the lives of her daughter and granddaughter, but this book is about much more than ethnicity. Gillan's work succeeds in transcending any single identity category and explores instead the multiple ways in which each of us learns to identify him or herself.

Best Food Book of 2014 by The Atlantic Looking at the historic Italian American community of East Harlem in the 1920s and 30s, Simone Cinotto recreates the bustling world of Italian life in New York City and demonstrates how food was at the center of the lives of immigrants and their children. From generational conflicts resolved around the family table to a vibrant food-based economy of ethnic producers, importers, and restaurateurs, food was essential to the creation of an Italian American identity. Italian American foods offered not only sustenance but also powerful narratives of community and difference, tradition and innovation as immigrants made their way through a city divided by class conflict, ethnic hostility, and racialized inequalities. Drawing on a vast array of resources including fascinating, rarely explored primary documents and fresh approaches in the study of consumer culture, Cinotto argues that Italian immigrants created a distinctive culture of food as a symbolic response to the needs of immigrant life, from the struggle for personal and group identity to the pursuit of social and economic power. Adding a transnational dimension to the study of Italian American foodways, Cinotto recasts Italian American food culture as an American "invention" resonant with traces of tradition.

Ugly Prey tells the riveting story of poor Italian immigrant Sabella Nitti, the first woman ever sentenced to hang in Chicago, in 1923, for the alleged murder of her husband. Journalist Emilie Le Beau Lucchesi leads readers through the case, showing how, with no evidence and no witnesses, Nitti was the target of an obsessed deputy sheriff and the victim of a faulty legal system. She was also—to the men who convicted her and reporters fixated on her—ugly. For that unforgiveable crime, the media painted her as a hideous, dirty, and unpredictable immigrant, almost an animal. Featuring two other fascinating women—the ambitious and ruthless journalist who helped demonize Sabella through her reports and the brilliant, beautiful, 23-year-old lawyer who helped humanize her with a jailhouse makeover—Ugly Prey is not just a page-turning courtroom drama but also a thought-provoking look at the intersection of gender, ethnicity, and class within the American justice system.

This volume brings together specialists from a variety of disciplines to develop a deeper understanding of the social, political, and cultural history of women in Italy in the years 1946-1960. Despite being a time when women and the family were at the center of national debates, and when society changed considerably, the fifteen years following the Second World War have tended to be overlooked or subsumed into discussions of other periods. By focusing on the experience of women and by broadening the frame of reference to include subjects and sources often ignored, or only alluded to, by traditional analyses, the essays in this volume break new ground and provide a corrective to previous interpretive models.

Author and history professor Dominic Candeloro presents an intriguing narrative record of the earliest beginning of the Italian communities in Chicago. The stories of Chicago's Italian communities are an important part of the rich and diverse mosaic of the city's history. As a rail center, an industrial center and America's fastest growing major city, Chicago offered opportunities for immigrants from all nations. Italians in Chicago explores the lives of 10 significant members of the Chicago Italian-American community going back to the 1850s. This book is a collaborative and cumulative effort, and gives glimpses and echoes of what occurred in the Italian-American past in Chicago. Including vintage images and tales of such individuals as Father Armando Pierini, Anthony Scariano, and Joe Bruno, and groups such as the Aragona Club and the Maria Santissima Lauretana Society, this collection uncovers the challenges and triumphs of these Italian immigrants.

Brown in the Windy City is the first history to examine the migration and settlement of Mexicans and Puerto Ricans in postwar Chicago. Lilia Fernández reveals how the two populations arrived in Chicago in the midst of tremendous social and economic change and, in spite of declining industrial employment and massive urban renewal projects, managed to carve out a geographic and racial place in one of America’s great cities. Through their experiences in the city’s central neighborhoods over the course of these three decades, Fernández demonstrates how Mexicans and Puerto Ricans collectively articulated a distinct racial position in Chicago, one that was flexible and fluid, neither black nor white.