Historicizing the U.S. Ethnic Press: The Case of Italian American Journalism
The history of American journalism is as diverse and multilingual as the people who built the United States. While overlooked by historians for decades, the ethnic newspapers do make up an important part of American periodicals, as it is now fully demonstrated by the results of the numerous digitization programs launched both in America and in Europe. In recent years, the study of the ethnic press has greatly evolved, thus sharpening the interest in migrant media and giving rise to a growing literature. This presentation aims to reconstruct the journey of Italian American newspapers as wandering objects, manufactured by wandering editors spreading wandering information, ideas and ideologies. It argues that studying the circulation of those periodicals requires to analyze them not just as a mere information tool, or as texts, but as mediators-objects that create memory, produce sociability, and impact the economic, political and social lives of Americans and Italians as much as that of Italian Americans. It contends that it is therefore essential to historicize the Italian-American press, by examining state and city archives, laws, oral testimonies, autobiographies, police reports, congressional hearings, and correspondences on both sides of the Atlantic, in order to show how those papers interacted with their environment, responded to the political pressure they were faced with, interacted with other ethnic communities, and created cohesion or tensions within the Little Italies or between the US and their homeland.
Bénédicte Deschamps is Associate Professor at the Université Paris Cité, where she teaches U.S. history. Her research focuses on Italian American history, the U.S. ethnic press, and Italian American journalism. Her publications include Histoire de la presse italo-américaine: du Risorgimento à la Grande Guerre (L’Harmattan, 2020); Voci d’Italia fuori dall’Italia (co-edited with Pantaleone Sergi, Pellegrini, 2021); and Immigration and Exile: Foreign-Language Press in the UK & US (co-edited with Stéphanie Prevost, Bloomsbury, 2024).
