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By Richard Peterson   My wife, Anita, and I live in southern Illinois, about 10 miles from Herrin, a community with a rich Italian-American heritage. Its historical society recently asked me to give a talk on Italian-Americans in baseball history.   Once I began my research, I was surprised by the number of notable Italian-Americans w...

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Joe DiMaggio. Yogi Berra. Phil Rizzuto. Names instantly recognized for being extraordinary baseball players, but not only, also Italian-American. Famous Italian-Americans who were all each inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame.   Back in the late 1910s and early 1920s, children born first generation American to Italian immigrants learned t...

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Everyone knows that the first regional group among the Italian community in the US is the one from Sicily. The period of mass emigration, the one starting in 1880 and ending more or less in the early 20's of the XXth century, didn't see at the beginning Sicily as the main region of departure. Some Sicilians had previously gone to New Orleans (at th...

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By Niccoló Graffio   Since I began writing for this blog, my articles have dealt mainly with famous indigenous inhabitants of Southern Italy/Sicily. It behooves me to mention, though, since the destruction of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies in 1861, the majority of the members of our ethnos were born outside the borders of the modern state...

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by Robert A. Slayton   In this baseball season it is appropriate to celebrate Joe DiMaggio, who would have been one-hundred-and-one this year. One of the greatest baseball figures of his era, he played with grace yet power, creating records still unmatched by newer, better trained performers. But Joe DiMaggio gave this country something more...

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