Blurred Nationalities across the North Atlantic

By concentrating on the years between 1763 and 1846, Luca Codignola treads where few recent historians of Italian migration have dared. The latest round of migration histories have tended to focus upon the years from the last quarter of the nineteenth century and afterward. There are benefits to focusing on these later years, of course: namely, massive numbers of migrants easily identified as “Italian.” Before that period, Italy was not a nation but a collection of colonies, principalities, and city-states, somewhat unified by language and civilta italiano, a mostly literary construct based upon a common, poorly defined connection to ancient Rome. Who, then, was Italian? Previous scholars of migration for the period before the Resorgimento tended to select migrants with “Italian-sounding” names but only if they made a clearly positive contribution in North America. Neither infamous gangsters nor the law abiding but nonillustrious need apply for inclusion in the studies of what Codignola calls the “Contributionist” school. Others, members of what Codignola dubs the “Enlightenment” school, were just as selective, choosing only those who could be demonstrated to hold republican ideals and assiduously ignoring migrants associated with traditionalism, and especially Catholicism. Codignola's “Italian” migrants emphasize the loose, adaptable, and many “national” or regional identities of early modern migrants between the Italian peninsula and North America. He follows priests, traders, ideas, and even goods in his attempt to establish migration networks between Italy and North America. In a period when there was no Italian nation and in which many scholars still think there was no significant migration to North America, Codignola's broader answer to the question of “what is an Italian migrant?” allows him to find, analyze, and expound upon migration experiences and the broader networks that enabled them, all of which other scholars have either missed or intentionally ignored

Archaeology · Art · Economic history · Emigration · Enlightenment · Genealogy · Geography · Peninsula · Period (music · Quarter (Canadian coin · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · History

• The Catholic Clergy in the North Atlantic Area, 1763-1830

  Open Access•Luca Codignola•Almanack•2020

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