Book Review

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Book Review | The Journal of American History, 86.1 | The History Cooperative

Building Little Italy: Philadelphia's Italians before Mass Migration. By Richard N. Juliani. (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998. xxiv, 398 pp. Cloth, $50.00, isbn 0-271-01731-7. Paper, $19.95, isbn 0-271-01732-5.)

In Building Little Italy, Richard N. Juliani has undertaken an enormous task and filled a major void in our appreciation of the role that Italians played in early American history. Having written on the subject previously, Juliani utilizes sociological and historical methodologies to ascertain answers as to the who, why, where, and how of Philadelphia's pre-1880 immigrants, and the reciprocal impression that the host society made on the newcomers. 1

Re-creating this history is fraught with many challenges, among which are the paucity of extant primary sources, name misspellings, and the virtual absence of unadulterated archival holdings. By its very character, this endeavor results in a somewhat fragmentary history and is therefore reliant upon inference and supposition. Although Juliani is critical of others for relying too heavily on such inference, he too has had to resort to deductive reasoning and tentative conclusions. Fortunately, this has not deterred Juliani, who correctly describes Philadelphia's eighteenth-century Italians as small in number but, nevertheless, able to make a mark on the city's cultural and economic posture. . . .

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