Rudolph J. Vecoli: A Tribute

Fort those who haven't seen it yet, here is a link at the June 23rd New York Times obituary for the Italian-American historian Rudolph J. Vecoli, who died on June 17, at the age of 81.


Vecoli was a founder and former president of the American Italian Historical Association (1966-1970) and of the Immigration and Ethnic History Society (1982-1985), and  he served for 20 years as the chairman of the history committee advising the Statue of Liberty-Ellis Island Foundation (1983-2003). He also led for many years of the Immigration History Research Center at the University of Minnesota.


The obituary, written by William Grimes, says that his "searching chronicles of the American immigrant experience gave a new view of what immigrants kept and left behind." It underlines that:

"Mr. Vecoli argued against the notion that immigrants to the United States left their cultures behind and did their best to blend into mainstream American society. Rather, he wrote, they clung tenaciously to their traditions and developed strategies to retain their heritage and resist pressures to embrace the American social and economic system."

As a tribute, we offer a link to the full-text version of Rudolph J. Vecoli's essay "Gli Italo-Americani oggi" (in Italian), published in Storia dell’emigrazione italiana - Arrivi (Donzelli, Roma, 2002),

Among Rudolph J. Vecoli's books are:

Italian American Radicalism Old World Origins and New World Developments

Ethnicity: A neglected dimension of American history.

Cult and occult in Italian-American culture: The persistence of a religious heritage.

A selected bibliography on American immigration and ethnicity.

The coming of age of the Italian Americans, 1945-1974.

The resurgence of American immigration history.

Contadini in Chicago: A critique of The uprooted.

The people of New Jersey.

Italian Immigrants in Rural and Small Town America.