Culture
Most Italian Americans have assumed a mainstream American identity. Erik Amfitheatrof observed in 1973 that, "The children of the Italian immigrants no longer feel Italian. They are American. In shedding a sense of apartness from American life, they have also relinquished their once-powerful emotional associations with a remote Italian world...." Most immigrants arrived from Italy by 1914, so most can trace multiple generations in the new country. Many have inter-married with other ethnic groups. They are well represented in all fields of endeavor. Many Italian Americans still retain aspects of their culture. This includes Italian food, drink, art, annual Italian American festivals, and a strong commitment to family, including extended family. Italian Americans influenced popular music, especially in the 1940s and 1950s, and continuing into the present, one of their major contributions to American culture.
A University of Chicago study of fifteen ethnic groups showed that Italian Americans were among those groups having the lowest percentages of divorce, unemployment, people on welfare and those incarcerated. On the other hand, they were among those groups with the highest percentages of two-parent families, elderly family members still living at home, and families who eat together on a regular basis.
The National Italian American Foundation (NIAF) - a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization headquartered in Washington, D.C. - works to represent Italian Americans, spread knowledge of the Italian language, foster U.S./Italy relations and connect the greater Italian American community. Additionally, two major Italian American fraternal and service organizations, Order Sons of Italy in America and Unico National, actively promote knowledge of Italian American history and culture. Another prominent organization, The Italic Institute of America, is also in the forefront of these activities. Italian-Americans remain strongly connected with their culture today.
Read more about this topic: Italian American
Famous quotes containing the word culture:
“Ours is a culture based on excess, on overproduction; the result is a steady loss of sharpness in our sensory experience. All the conditions of modern life—its material plenitude, its sheer crowdedness—conjoin to dull our sensory faculties.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)
“Here is this vast, savage, howling mother of ours, Nature, lying all around, with such beauty, and such affection for her children, as the leopard; and yet we are so early weaned from her breast to society, to that culture which is exclusively an interaction of man on man,—a sort of breeding in and in, which produces at most a merely English nobility, a civilization destined to have a speedy limit.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The hatred of the youth culture for adult society is not a disinterested judgment but a terror-ridden refusal to be hooked into the, if you will, ecological chain of breathing, growing, and dying. It is the demand, in other words, to remain children.”
—Midge Decter (b. 1927)