Italian Americans: The Complete History, Heritage & Living Legacy

From a Venetian sailor in 1635 New Amsterdam to 17 million descendants shaping every corner of American life — the definitive guide to the Italian American experience.

Contents

1. 1.Who Are Italian Americans?
2. 2.The Navigators: Italian Explorers and the Americas
3. 3.Early Arrivals: 1635–1880
4. 4.The Great Wave: Mass Migration, 1880–1924
5. 5.Prejudice, Violence & the Fight for Belonging
6. 6.Military Service: Loyalty Beyond Question
7. 7.The Postwar Transformation
8. 8.Italian American Cuisine: A Tradition Reinvented
9. 9.Cultural Contributions: Art, Music, Film, Science & Sport
10. 10.Demographics: Where Italian Americans Live Today
11. 11.Preserving the Heritage: Why It Matters Now
12. 12.Key Dates in Italian American History
13. 13.Sources & Further Reading

Who Are Italian Americans?

Italian Americans are citizens and residents of the United States who trace their ancestry, in whole or in part, to Italy. They constitute the fifth-largest self-reported ancestry group in the nation, after German, English, Irish, and "American." According to the 2020 U.S. Census, approximately 16.8 million people identified as having Italian heritage — roughly 5% of the total population. The 2022 American Community Survey placed the figure at about 16 million, or 4.8% of the country's 333.3 million residents.

These figures likely undercount the actual community. Intermarriage rates among Italian Americans exceeded 70% for those born after 1970, meaning tens of millions more carry partial Italian ancestry without reporting it. The National Italian American Foundation has estimated the true community may approach 26 million when partial ancestry is included.

Italian Americans are concentrated most densely in the urban Northeast and industrial Midwest, with Connecticut (16.1%), Rhode Island (15.5%), and New Jersey (14.6%) claiming the highest percentages of residents with Italian ancestry. New York State leads in raw numbers with over 2.3 million. But Italian Americans live in every state; California is second in total population with nearly 1.4 million, and even Texas — not historically associated with Italian immigration — counts over half a million residents of Italian descent.

By the Numbers: Between 1820 and 2004, approximately 5.5 million Italians migrated to the United States. By the time quota restrictions were abolished in 1965, Italy had sent 5,067,717 immigrants — 12% of all immigrants to the United States, surpassing both Great Britain (4.7 million) and Ireland (4.7 million) to become the second-largest immigrant group in American history.

The Navigators: Italian Explorers and the Americas

Long before the first Italian family settled in the New World, Italian navigators and cartographers were the driving force behind European exploration of the Americas. Their contributions were so foundational that the very name of the continents — America — derives from the Florentine explorer Amerigo Vespucci, who around 1501 demonstrated that the lands Columbus had reached were not Asia but an entirely separate landmass.

Christopher Columbus and the Age of Discovery

Cristoforo Colombo, a Genoese mariner sailing under the Spanish crown, completed four transatlantic voyages between 1492 and 1504 that opened the Western Hemisphere to sustained European contact. Whatever one's view of the consequences, the voyages were an inflection point in world history, and they were conceived and commanded by an Italian.

Giovanni Caboto (John Cabot)

Another Genoese navigator, Caboto explored the eastern coast of North America under commission from England's Henry VII in 1497. His voyages established England's territorial claims that would eventually produce the thirteen colonies and, ultimately, the United States.

Giovanni da Verrazzano

In 1524, this Florentine explorer became the first European to chart the Atlantic coast between Florida and New Brunswick, sailing into what is now New York Harbor. The Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge, connecting Brooklyn and Staten Island, bears his name — a 4,260-foot daily reminder of Italian primacy in Atlantic exploration.

Mapping the Continent

Italian cartographers, missionaries, and adventurers continued to shape the American landscape for centuries. Enrico Tonti, partnered with La Salle, founded the first European settlements in both Illinois (1679) and Arkansas (1683), earning him the title "Father of Arkansas." His brother Alfonso co-founded Detroit in 1701. The Jesuit priest Eusebio Kino mapped the American Southwest and what would become California in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Alessandro Malaspina charted much of the Pacific coast between 1789 and 1791.

Early Arrivals: 1635–1880

The first documented Italian resident in what would become the United States was Pietro Cesare Alberti, a Venetian seaman who settled in the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam in 1635. A small wave of Waldensian Protestants followed between 1654 and 1663, spreading across New Netherland and into what would become New York, New Jersey, and the Delaware River region.

Italians and the Founding of the Republic

Filippo Mazzei, a Tuscan physician and close friend of Thomas Jefferson, published a pamphlet arguing that "all men are by nature equally free and independent" — language that Jefferson incorporated into the Declaration of Independence. Francesco Vigo served as one of the primary financiers of the American Revolution on the frontier, bankrolling George Rogers Clark's campaigns in the Northwest Territory.

Italian Americans served in the Revolutionary War as both soldiers and officers. After independence, the trickle of arrivals included political refugees from the Italian peninsula's ongoing struggles for unification, among them Giuseppe Garibaldi himself, who lived in the United States in 1850–51.

Institutional Founders

The early Italian presence in America was disproportionately influential relative to its small numbers. Philip Trajetta established the nation's first conservatory of music in Boston in 1801. Thomas Jefferson recruited Sicilian musicians in 1805 to form a military band that became the nucleus of the U.S. Marine Band. Lorenzo Da Ponte — formerly Mozart's librettist — founded America's first opera house in New York in 1833.

Italian Jesuits founded missions, schools, and multiple universities across the country: Santa Clara University (1851), the University of San Francisco (1855), St. Bonaventure University (1858), Regis University (1877), and Gonzaga University (1887). These same Jesuits laid the groundwork for California's winemaking industry.

Civil War Service

Between 5,000 and 10,000 Italian Americans fought in the Civil War. The overwhelming majority served in the Union Army, including Francis B. Spinola, the first Italian American elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, who rose to the rank of general. The 39th New York Volunteer Infantry Regiment — nicknamed the "Garibaldi Guard" and containing 350 Italian members — recruited volunteers from across Europe. Six Italian Americans received the Medal of Honor, including Colonel Luigi Palma di Cesnola, who later became the first director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The Great Wave: Mass Migration, 1880–1924

The period between 1880 and 1914 constituted the largest sustained human migration in Italian history. During these thirty-four years, roughly 13 million Italians left Italy. Of these, more than 4 million came to the United States, with 3 million arriving in just the fourteen years between 1900 and 1914. The overwhelming majority came from the Mezzogiorno — southern Italy and Sicily — where centuries of foreign domination, feudal land systems, crushing taxation, soil exhaustion, and mandatory seven-year military conscription had created desperate poverty.

They did not come as "Italians." They came as Neapolitans, Sicilians, Calabrians, Abruzzesi. They might not have understood each other's dialects. But on arrival in the United States, they became Italian Americans.

— Library of Congress, Immigration and Relocation in U.S. History

The Push and the Pull

The economic calculus was straightforward: the prospect of wage labor in America, even at below-average rates, was vastly preferable to deepening rural poverty in southern Italy. Most arrivals were young men — so-called "birds of passage" — who intended to work a few years, send remittances home, and return. According to historian Thomas J. Archdeacon, 46 percent of Italians who entered between 1899 and 1924 did eventually go back. But when World War I severed transatlantic travel and American wages rose sharply, the calculus changed. Most decided to stay permanently.

The Padrone System

Immigrants without industrial skills entered a labor market dominated by the padrone system, in which Italian middlemen brokered employment for groups of men, controlling their wages, housing, and transportation in exchange for fees. The system was exploitative but served as the primary mechanism connecting unskilled Italian immigrants with available work in construction, mining, and public works.

Little Italys

Immigrants clustered in older urban neighborhoods that became known as "Little Italys" — crowded, substandard tenements that bred tuberculosis and other communicable diseases. Yet these enclaves were also centers of vibrant civil and social life. The festa street festival connected immigrants to the traditions of their ancestral villages. Small businesses — bakeries, groceries, barbershops — created a self-sustaining economic ecosystem.

The men built America's physical infrastructure. By 1890, an estimated 90% of New York City's and 99% of Chicago's public-works employees were Italian. They laid railroad tracks, dug subways, constructed bridges, erected the first skyscrapers. Women worked as seamstresses in the garment industry or did piecework at home.

Towns Founded by Italians: Italian immigrants didn't just settle in existing cities. They founded entirely new communities: Roseto, Pennsylvania (later famous in sociological studies for its remarkably low heart-disease rate, attributed to communal social bonds); Tontitown, Arkansas (named for Henri de Tonti); and Valdese, North Carolina (settled by Waldensians). Each became a permanent anchor for Italian American life outside the major urban centers.

The Quota Laws

The Emergency Quota Act of 1921 and the Immigration Act of 1924 were designed in large part to curtail southern and eastern European immigration. Under the National Origins Formula, Italy — the fifth-largest ancestry group in the U.S. — was allotted only 3.87% of the annual quota. Despite these restrictions, Italian immigrants still constituted 6–7% of all arrivals, and 455,315 more came in the 1920s. When the quota system was finally abolished by the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, Italians had already grown to be the second-largest immigrant group in American history.

Prejudice, Violence & the Fight for Belonging

The Italian American experience cannot be understood without confronting the pervasive discrimination that immigrants faced upon arrival. Southern Italians, with darker complexions than northern Europeans, were subjected to pseudo-scientific racial theories that classified "Mediterranean types" as inherently inferior. They were called dagos, wops, and guineas. They were denied housing, refused employment, and in the most extreme cases, murdered.

The 1891 New Orleans Lynching

The single darkest chapter in Italian American history occurred on March 14, 1891, when a mob of thousands — including some of New Orleans' most prominent citizens, among them future mayors and governors — stormed the Orleans Parish Prison and murdered eleven Italian immigrants. It remains the largest single mass lynching in American history.

The victims had been accused of involvement in the murder of police chief David Hennessy. Six had been acquitted at trial; three others had received mistrials. There was no solid evidence against any of them. The mob, inflamed by inflammatory newspaper coverage and anti-Italian sentiment, broke into the city's arsenal, seized weapons, and stormed the prison. The men were shot, hanged, and their bodies mutilated.

Italy severed diplomatic relations with the United States. There were rumors of war. President Benjamin Harrison eventually paid a $25,000 indemnity to the Italian government. In a bid to ease tensions with Italian Americans — and shore up the immigrant vote ahead of his difficult 1892 re-election campaign — Harrison proclaimed the first nationwide celebration of Columbus Day in 1892, commemorating the 400th anniversary of Columbus's landing.

A Pattern, Not an Isolated Event: The 1891 New Orleans lynching was the most violent episode, but far from unique. More than forty lynchings of Italian Americans occurred in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, spanning states from Louisiana to Colorado. Theodore Roosevelt, a decade before his presidency, wrote to his sister about the 1891 incident: he personally found the lynching "rather a good thing."

New Orleans did not formally acknowledge this atrocity until April 12, 2019, when Mayor LaToya Cantrell issued an official Proclamation of Apology. The Order Sons and Daughters of Italy in America continues to raise funds for a permanent memorial at the site.

The Slur That Built a Word

The 1891 incident had another lasting consequence: it introduced the word "Mafia" into the American lexicon and welded it to the Italian American identity. For over a century, Italian Americans have fought against the disproportionate association of their ethnicity with organized crime — a stereotype reinforced by Hollywood even as the overwhelming majority of Italian Americans have never had any connection to criminal activity. A University of Chicago study of fifteen ethnic groups found that Italian Americans had among the lowest rates of incarceration, unemployment, welfare use, and divorce.

Wartime Persecution

When Italy declared war on the United States on December 11, 1941, un-naturalized Italian Americans were classified as "enemy aliens" under the Alien and Sedition Act. Executive Order 9066 restricted the movements of more than 600,000 Italian Americans nationwide. Over 10,000 were forcibly relocated from the West Coast; thousands more were subjected to curfews, required to carry identity cards, and had their property seized. Hundreds were interned in military camps for up to two years — despite no evidence of espionage or sabotage.

On November 7, 2000, President Bill Clinton signed the Wartime Violation of Italian American Civil Liberties Act, ordering a comprehensive review of this treatment. In 2010, California issued a formal apology. The full extent of the government's wartime actions against Italian Americans remains partially classified.

Military Service: Loyalty Beyond Question

World War I

When the United States entered World War I in 1917, the Italian American community mobilized with extraordinary commitment. Italian American servicemen — both native-born and Italian-born — made up an estimated 12 percent of total American forces, a vastly disproportionate share given that Italian Americans constituted less than 4% of the population. They also suffered more than 10% of all war casualties. Michael Valente, an Italian-born infantryman, earned the Medal of Honor; 103 Italian Americans received the Distinguished Service Cross.

World War II

Between 750,000 and 1.5 million Americans of Italian descent served in the armed forces during World War II — roughly 10% of total forces. Fourteen Italian Americans received the Medal of Honor. John Basilone, a Marine gunnery sergeant from Raritan, New Jersey, earned both the Medal of Honor at Guadalcanal and the Navy Cross at Iwo Jima, where he was killed in action. Dominic Gentile became one of the war's top fighter aces.

On the home front, Enrico Fermi's work was essential to the development of the atomic bomb. Rose Bonavita, an aircraft riveter commended personally by President Roosevelt, became one of the inspirations for the iconic "Rosie the Riveter" image. Chef Boyardee — the company founded by Ettore Boiardi — was one of the largest suppliers of rations for Allied forces.

The war permanently transformed Italian American life. The GI Bill gave returning veterans access to college education for the first time on a mass scale, launching a generational leap in economic mobility.

The Postwar Transformation

The decades after 1945 witnessed the most dramatic social transformation in Italian American history. Armed with GI Bill educations, better-paying skilled trades, and the general postwar economic expansion, Italian Americans left the Little Italys in enormous numbers for suburban communities. Intermarriage rates soared. Dr. Richard D. Alba of SUNY Albany found that while only 8% of Italian Americans born before 1920 had mixed ancestry, 70% of those born after 1970 were children of intermarriage. By 1985, 72% of Italian American men and 64% of Italian American women under thirty married someone without Italian heritage.

Economic Ascent

The upward trajectory was steep and measurable. In the second generation, approximately 70% of men held blue-collar jobs; by the third generation, that figure dropped to about 50%. By 1987, Italian American household income exceeded the national average and had grown faster than any other ethnic group except Jewish Americans since the 1950s. By 1990, more than 65% of Italian Americans worked in managerial, professional, or white-collar occupations. In 1999, the median annual income of Italian American families was $61,300, compared to $50,000 for all American families.

Educational Achievement

The transformation in educational attainment was equally striking. Earlier generations of Italian immigrants had often viewed extended education with suspicion, expecting children to contribute to family income as soon as possible. But the 1970 Census revealed that Italian Americans under 45 had reached educational levels comparable to the national average. Within six decades of the peak immigration year, the community had equaled national norms. Today, Italian Americans have an average high school graduation rate and a higher-than-average rate of advanced degrees.

Political Engagement

Italian Americans rose to prominence in every level of government. Fiorello La Guardia served as mayor of New York City from 1934 to 1946. John Pastore of Rhode Island became the first Italian American governor (1945) and U.S. Senator (1950). Geraldine Ferraro became the first woman nominated for vice president by a major party in 1984. Nancy Pelosi became the first woman Speaker of the House in 2007. Antonin Scalia and Samuel Alito served on the Supreme Court.

Notably, Italian Americans have demonstrated a distinctive pattern of political independence, eschewing ethnic bloc voting. La Guardia actually lost the Italian vote in 1941 to his Irish opponent. This individualism — voting on candidates and issues rather than ethnic loyalty — distinguishes the Italian American political tradition from many other ethnic communities.

Italian American Cuisine: A Tradition Reinvented

Italian American cuisine is not Italian cuisine. It is its own tradition — a fusion born from Southern Italian poverty cooking meeting American abundance, adapted by immigrants who for the first time in their lives could afford meat, soft bread, eggs, and cheese in quantity. Understanding this distinction is essential to understanding Italian American culture itself.

The Transformation of Poverty Cooking

In southern Italy, the non-landowning classes survived on a mostly vegetarian diet of hard bread and soups; meat was reserved for celebrations. When these same people arrived in America and found that manual labor paid enough to purchase ingredients once reserved for the wealthy, they responded with enthusiasm. Italian American cuisine kept the simplicity of cucina povera — its emphasis on quick preparation and few components — but amplified it with rich ingredients: generous use of meat, cheese, and eggs.

Substitutions were necessary and creative. Basil, olive oil, and specific Italian cheeses were unavailable, so immigrants used dried oregano, corn oil, and mozzarella. Shrimp replaced the mini lobster-like crustaceans of Italian scampi (the name stuck, even though "shrimp scampi" is essentially "shrimp lobster"). When they couldn't find the right tomatoes, they adapted sauces with what local markets offered.

Iconic Dishes That Exist Nowhere in Italy

Many of America's most beloved "Italian" dishes are, in fact, Italian American inventions:

Spaghetti and meatballs: In Italy, polpette are tiny and served as a separate course, never atop a mountain of pasta. The combination was an American innovation, enabled by cheap beef. Chicken Parmesan: A pure Italian American creation adapted to use chicken, a protein more available than veal. Fettuccine Alfredo: While inspired by a simple Roman butter-and-cheese pasta, the cream-laden American version bears little resemblance. Pepperoni pizza: Cannot be ordered in Italy. Baked ziti: An Italian American adaptation of pasta al forno. Vodka sauce: Appeared in the 1970s; its origins are debated but it is generally considered Italian American.

From Ethnic Food to American Staple

Italian cuisine is now one of the top three most popular cuisines in the United States, alongside Mexican and Chinese. More than nine out of ten Americans have tried Italian food, and about half eat it frequently. The transformation from "foreign" to foundational took roughly a century: by the 1940s, the WPA described Italian restaurants as "interesting, sometimes cheap, exciting places to eat." By the 1980s and 1990s, northern Italian dishes like risotto elevated the cuisine from popular to prestigious.

Italian Americans also revolutionized American winemaking. Families like Mondavi, Gallo, Sebastiani, and Simi built California's wine industry from the ground up, surviving Prohibition and emerging to make American wine a global competitor.

Cultural Contributions: Art, Music, Film, Science & Sport

Music

The Italian influence on American music spans from the classical to the contemporary. Philip Trajetta founded America's first conservatory in 1801. Lorenzo Da Ponte established the first opera house. Arturo Toscanini, conducting the NBC Symphony Orchestra from 1937 to 1954, introduced millions of Americans to classical music through radio broadcasts. In popular music, Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Tony Bennett, Perry Como, and Madonna all shaped the American soundscape. Nick LaRocca's Original Dixieland Jass Band recorded the first jazz record in 1917. Harry Warren (born Salvatore Guaragna) won three Academy Awards for songwriting and composed more hits than Irving Berlin.

Film and Television

Frank Capra — director of It's a Wonderful Life and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington — won three Academy Awards and essentially defined the genre of the optimistic American film. Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, Brian De Palma, and Quentin Tarantino (of partial Italian descent) are among the most influential directors in cinema history. Rudolph Valentino was the first great male movie star. Italian American animators created some of America's most iconic cartoon characters: Al Taliaferro created Donald Duck, Walter Lantz (Lanza) created Woody Woodpecker, Joseph Oriolo co-created Casper the Friendly Ghost, and Joseph Barbera co-created Tom and Jerry.

Science and Innovation

Enrico Fermi, who emigrated from Italy in 1938, achieved the first controlled nuclear chain reaction and was essential to the Manhattan Project. Italian Americans have won multiple Nobel Prizes across physics, medicine, and economics. In business, Amadeo Giannini founded the Bank of Italy — later Bank of America — pioneering the concept of branch banking. His bank financed the Golden Gate Bridge and Walt Disney's Snow White, the first full-length American animated film. Other Italian American enterprises became household names: Ghirardelli Chocolate, Planters Peanuts, Progresso, Chef Boyardee, Contadina, and Jacuzzi.

Sports

Joe DiMaggio's 56-game hitting streak in 1941 remains one of the most iconic records in professional sports. Rocky Marciano retired as the only undefeated heavyweight boxing champion in history (49–0). Vince Lombardi, the legendary football coach, gave his name to the Super Bowl trophy. Gene Sarazen (Eugenio Saraceni) won both the PGA Championship and U.S. Open in 1922. Italian Americans have achieved prominence in virtually every major American sport, from baseball (Yogi Berra, Tommy Lasorda) to football (Joe Montana, Dan Marino) to auto racing (Mario Andretti).

Language and Literature

Italian is the fifth most spoken language in the United States after English, with over one million speakers. Enrollment in Italian language courses at American colleges grew 30% between 1998 and 2002, faster than French or German. Italian American authors — from Gay Talese and Don DeLillo to Adriana Trigiani and Lisa Scottoline — have shaped American letters. Og Mandino's inspirational books have sold over 50 million copies worldwide.

Demographics: Where Italian Americans Live Today

Sources: U.S. Census Bureau, 2020 Census; American Community Survey 2022; World Population Review 2026.

Metropolitan Concentrations

The New York metropolitan area leads the nation with approximately 2.16 million Italian Americans, followed by Philadelphia (737,000) and Chicago (575,000). Boston, Pittsburgh, Providence, and the San Francisco Bay Area also maintain large and historically significant communities.

The Global Italian Diaspora

Italian Americans are part of a much larger global diaspora. Argentina has the world's largest population of Italian descent (approximately 25 million, or about 62% of its population). Brazil counts roughly 28 million people of Italian heritage (15% of its population). Canada has 1.6 million. Altogether, more people of Italian descent live outside Italy than inside it.

Preserving the Heritage: Why It Matters Now

Italian American heritage stands at an inflection point. The generation that immigrated is nearly gone. Their children — who grew up in the Little Italys, who spoke dialect at home, who remember the festa and the corner salumeria — are aging. The stories they carry are irreplaceable, and every year that passes without recording them is a permanent loss.

Organizations like the Order Sons and Daughters of Italy in America, the National Italian American Foundation, the Italian Sons and Daughters of America, and the Calandra Italian American Institute at CUNY work to preserve and advance the community's interests. But the challenge of preservation in an era of assimilation and intermarriage requires new tools and new urgency.

The stories of our grandparents and great-grandparents — the crossings, the sacrifices, the neighborhoods they built — are not history that belongs in a museum. They are living heritage that shapes who we are today. And they are disappearing.

The Columbus Day Question

Columbus Day has served as the primary civic expression of Italian American identity since President Harrison proclaimed it in 1892 — directly in response to anti-Italian violence. For Italian Americans, the holiday was never solely about Columbus the man; it was about visibility, legitimacy, and belonging in a nation that had lynched, discriminated against, and excluded them. The movement to replace it with Indigenous Peoples' Day is experienced by many Italian Americans not as historical correction but as cultural erasure — the removal of the one day that acknowledged their community's existence and contributions. This tension reflects the broader challenge of honoring multiple histories simultaneously.

Fighting Stereotypes

The Commission for Social Justice, the anti-defamation arm of OSIA, continues to fight the disproportionate association of Italian Americans with organized crime in media and entertainment. While organized crime exists in every ethnic group, no other community has been so persistently defined by it in popular culture. The data tells a different story: Italian Americans rank among the most law-abiding, economically productive, and civically engaged populations in the United States.

Heritage Archives and Digital Preservation

A new generation of Italian Americans is turning to digital tools — oral history recording, GEDCOM family trees, photo archives, and DNA genealogy — to preserve what earlier generations took for granted as simply "the way things are." Heritage preservation organizations are racing to capture the memories of the last surviving immigrants and their children before those stories vanish forever.

Key Dates in Italian American History

• 1492 — Christopher Columbus reaches the Americas.
• 1524 — Giovanni da Verrazzano explores the Atlantic coast, entering New York Harbor.
• 1635 — Pietro Cesare Alberti becomes the first documented Italian resident in New Amsterdam.
• 1776 — Filippo Mazzei's writings influence the Declaration of Independence.
• 1801 — Philip Trajetta founds the first American conservatory of music in Boston.
• 1833 — Lorenzo Da Ponte opens America's first opera house in New York.
• 1861–65 — 5,000–10,000 Italian Americans serve in the Civil War; six earn the Medal of Honor.
• 1880–1914 — Over 4 million Italians immigrate to the United States in the Great Wave.
• 1891 — Eleven Italians lynched in New Orleans — the largest mass lynching in U.S. history.
• 1892 — President Harrison proclaims the first nationwide Columbus Day in response to anti-Italian violence.
• 1906 — Amadeo Giannini's Bank of Italy (later Bank of America) begins branch banking in San Francisco.
• 1917–18 — Italian Americans constitute ~12% of U.S. forces in World War I.
• 1924 — Immigration Act drastically curtails Italian immigration through quota system.
• 1934 — Fiorello La Guardia becomes mayor of New York City.
• 1941–45 — Up to 1.5 million Italian Americans serve in WWII; 600,000+ classified as "enemy aliens."
• 1942 — Enrico Fermi achieves the first controlled nuclear chain reaction.
• 1965 — Immigration and Nationality Act abolishes national-origin quotas.
• 1984 — Geraldine Ferraro becomes first woman vice-presidential nominee of a major party.
• 2000 — President Clinton signs the Wartime Violation of Italian American Civil Liberties Act.
• 2007 — Nancy Pelosi becomes the first woman Speaker of the House.
• 2019 — New Orleans issues official apology for the 1891 lynching, 128 years later.
• 2020 — U.S. Census records 16.8 million Americans of Italian ancestry.

The Alghini Institute for Italian Americans (AIIA) is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit dedicated to preserving Italian American heritage. Our Italian American Heritage Archive connects families to their stories before the living memory is lost. Explore the Archive →