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The North End of Boston's Italian Heritage

The North End of Boston's Italian Heritage

Boston's North End has a rich, varied, and complex history. Although best known today for its Italian culture, Italians were preceded in this area by other immigrant groups such as the Jews and the Irish. The Italians who immigrated to the North End were by no means a monolithic group. Indeed, the first Italian immigrants to the North End were from Genoa, but they were soon followed by the Campanians, the Sicilians, the Avellinese, the Neopolitans and the Abrussesians, with each if these group settling in its own area creating their own enclave within the North End (Nichols, 2).

This report will examine Boston's Italian North End. It will discuss its origins (geographically, politically, and economically), who settled there and why, if and how the immigrants reflected American growth and values, and the issues that confronted the Italian immigrants to North End. It will trace the transition from "Boston Italian immigrants to Boston Italian-Americans" (Pulco, x).

From its beginning, the North End has been cut off from the rest of Boston. It is a peninsula that juts out into Boston harbor. It encompasses only about one square mile. Its geography had social and economic consequences well into the twentieth century. In colonial days, the North End was known as the "Island of North Boston" (An Historical Overview of the North End," 1). In the early 1700s, the North End developed rapidly and by the 1750s, it had "become a hub of commercial social and intellectual activity. For Bostonians of English descent, it was the fashionable place to live" (An Historical Overview of the North End," 2, 2).

The English in the North End were followed by the new Americans, the Irish and then Jewish settlers. By 1900, the North End had deteriorated into a crowded slum of tenement buildings. Italians began moving into the North End in large numbers in the late nineteenth century. ...

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The North End of Boston's Italian Heritage. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 10:55, March 29, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/2000000.html