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By John Mancini, Executive Director Italic Institute of America, Floral Park, L.I.   Borough President James Oddo's announcement that the Columbus Day Parade will be replaced by an Italian festival because a festival is "deeper and richer," beggars the imagination.   Granted, the traditional parade failed to excite the masses, but it...

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By Lakshmi Gandhi   It's been 521 years since the Italian explorer Christopher Columbus "sailed the ocean blue/in fourteen hundred and ninety-two." Since then, there have been thousands of parades, speeches and statues commemorating Columbus, along with a critical rethinking of his life and legacy. But the question remains, how did a ma...

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Se vi domando: "Chi sono gli italiani rappresentati sulle banconote americane?", probabilmente risponderete in coro "Nessuno", siccome ogni banconota porta con se il ritratto di un presidente, e come ben sappiamo tutti, non c'è mai stato un presidente italiano.   Ovviamente per italiano intendiamo di origine italiana perchè secondo la costit...

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The Columbus Day Parade Committee named Vincent Vetrini as the grand marshal of this year's event, while Joseph Luciano received the Monsignor Anthony Maltese Humanitarian Award and Scott Mikos was named recipient of the DiRubba Community Service Award. Vetrini, a longtime supporter of the Columbus Day Parade Committee, is the co-founder of the Ea...

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George Anastasia, who launched his career at this newspaper in 1969 when it was the Woodbury Daily Times and became an award-winning journalist at the Philadelphia Inquirer and author of eight books about organized crime, has been selected as 2014 Italian-American Citizen of the Year by the Gloucester County Italian Heritage Commission.   Th...

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In the late summer of 1983, two local men with much proud Italian blood running through their veins, decided it was about time that the Nutley and Belleville area had its own Columbus Day Parade.   John V. Kelly, then president of Nutley Savings Bank and a state assemblyman, and Belleville businessman Vincent "Jimmy" Donadia each pledged $1,...

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At the annual Columbus Day celebration, Alfred Fusco is a fixture as familiar as the zeppole he's become popular for serving at the downtown celebration of Italian-American heritage and culture.   But he won't be working the booth this Sunday, a first since the city's celebration started a half decade ago: Fusco has earned a place at the fro...

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Memphis City Council is scheduled to vote on a resolution that authorizes the Memphis chapter of UNICO – the Italian-American fraternal organization – to move the statue of Christopher Columbus from a Downtown park to Marquette Park in East Memphis. UNICO commissioned the Columbus statue, which was placed in 1987 in the new Columbus Park on the so...

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The Seattle Human Rights Commission is doubling down on its effort to purge Columbus Day from its list of city celebrations, and have it replaced in the Emerald City with "Indigenous Peoples' Day."   When Christopher Columbus sailed the ocean blue in 1492, the commission believes he was up to no good.    Read more   Source...

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When Italian immigrants began shifting their focus of practical identity from the old country to the new, they created a change in consciousness that resulted in a loss of cultural memory that would be vital for the continuation of Italian identities in the United States. This condition is similar to what Benedict Anderson addresses in his study Im...

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