Authored by Megan Maye
Cultural differences and inadequate understandings between immigrants and the United States has been an issue in the country for many years. The number of immigrants who come to the United States has increased annually (Segal and Mayadas 2005, 564), most likely causing growing concern between both parties.
Authored by Reba Weatherford
The outside of the program for the concert honoring Syvilla Fort.
On November 3, 1975 the Black Theater Alliance held a concert in the Majestic Theatre at Marymount Manhattan College titled Dance Genesis: Three Generations Salute Syvilla Fort. Syvilla Fort, and influential choreographer and dance teacher, has been described as “an important figure in American dance” (Bocek 2016, 14) and as a “just plain good person” (McDonagh 1975, 34). The concert was hosted by choreographer Alvin Ailey and performer Harry Belafonte, both former students of Fort. Syvilla Fort herself was also in attendance. Continue reading
Authored By Gail Hedstrom
Cheese Box Cover, circa 1850, Rosemaling painting in the Telemark style on the cover of a round wooden cheese box, 17.5” x 3.25” (44.45 x 8.255 cm), Grant County Historical Society, Elbow Lake, MN, Photograph by Gail M. Hedstrom. Courtesy of Grant County Historical Society and Museum.
Nearly one million people emigrated from Norway to the United States between 1820 and 1920. The reasons for migration included economic hardship, difficulty raising crops, dissatisfaction with the government, and concern regarding religious freedom. During this time, the United States of America was inviting people to homestead the unsettled Midwest. Inexpensive land and a fresh start presented an opportunity that many could not resist (Blegen 1931). Those making the journey used trunks and chests, to carry personal belongings. Often the trunks and chests were adorned with rosemaling (Stoughton Historical Society 2019). Continue reading
Authored by John Blodgett
During the Fall 1976 semester Marymount Manhattan College differentiated from its growing dance, and theatre programs to introduce a concert series that brought classical music to New York City. Marymount Manhattan College was a religious college, and is a college that prides itself on diversity as its mission statement states, “Faithful to the vision of its founders, Marymount Manhattan has a long history of reaching out to diverse populations in need of higher education”(Marymount Manhattan College, n.d.). The Music Project was a key program in its promotion of Marymount Manhattan College’s goal to provide opportunities for diverse and underrepresented people. As the Music Project consisted of a group of musicians from across the world, and provided an opportunity for these musicians to start their careers.
Continue readingAuthored by Michael J. Krasnoff
Taken of an unnamed student at Farmingdale State University’s Engineering Technology program. This photo does more than portray a student and a plane, it is a living document of Farmingdale State University as a pioneer in creating a post-World War II college level aviation program that was previously only offered in vocational schools.
World War II played a major role in the evolution of the workforce. “The war left an altered economy that demanded a workforce whose education and training needed to be more technical in nature” (Cavaioli 2012, 139).
Authored by AJ Lent
In the early 1900s, working conditions for the common worker, especially immigrants, were poor, and unions sprung up in order to organize workers and campaign for better conditions. The International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union was founded in 1900 by eleven Jewish Old World tailors (The Editors 2009) and though it was initially male-only, over time it “organized thousands of unskilled and semi-skilled women, mostly Jewish and Italian young immigrants” (Cornell University Library, n.d.). Although in some places, such as Pennsylvania, Italian immigrants found it difficult to unionize due to the cultural beliefs of their home (Fenton 1959, 133), unions in New York City had better luck, and in 1909 and 1910 respectively ILGWU organized two of the better known industrial strikes in the twentieth century (Cornell University Library, n.d.).
With the large numbers of Italian immigrants arriving in the country at the time, this was an important breakthrough, one which Luigi Antonini became an important part of. Born in 1883 in southern Italy, Antonini immigrated to America in 1908, settling in New York City and tuning pianos and rolling cigars before he became a garment worker (LaGumina 2005, 19). Joining the ILGWU, Antonini became very active and was voted onto the executive board of Local 25 a year after joining; he then went on to become a vice president in 1925, then First Vice-President in 1934 (Cornell University Library n.d.), as well as serving as the general secretary for Local 89, an Italian-speaking local that at one point had around 37,000 members (Grossman 1996, 28).
Antonini served as the First Vice-President for thirty years, and in that time, not only was he an avid orator for Italian immigrant workers, he also actively spoke out against fascism and Benito Mussolini as World War II approached, going so far as to helping sponsor a rally of Italian American workers in January 1942. After the war, he advocated for aid for Italy and helped create the Franklin D. Roosevelt Vocational School in Mondello, Sicily (LaGumina 2005, 20).
Throughout his life, this plaque was not the only award Luigi Antonini received for his efforts in the labor movement. Through his efforts, the ILGWU grew and more Italian immigrants found a supportive union that advocated for their rights and organized strikes to improve conditions and pay. Luigi Antonini was an instrumental figure in improving the lives of thousands of Italian immigrant workers, making them and their families safer in a new, sometimes hostile country.
References:
Cornell University Library n.d. “ILGWU. Local 89. Luigi Antonini Correspondence, 1919-1968”. Accessed March 17, 2019. http://rmc.library.cornell.edu/EAD/htmldocs/KCL05780-023.html#link7
Fenton, Edwin. 1959. “Italians in the Labor Movement”, Pennsylvania History: A Journal of Mid-Atlantic Studies 26, no. 2 (April): 133-148. https://www.jstor.org/stable/27769876?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents
Grossman, Ronald P. The Italians in America. Minneapolis: Lerner Publications Co, 1966.
LaGumina, Salvatore J.. “Antonini, Luigi (1883-1968)”. In The Italian American Experience: An Encyclopedia, edited by Salvatore J. LaGumina, Frank J. Cavaioli, Salvatore Primeggia, and Joseph A. Varacalli , 19-20. New York: Tayler & Francis Group, 2005. https://books.google.com/books?id=Tm-AAAAAQBAJ&pg=PT6&source=gbs_toc_r&cad=3#v=onepage&q&f=false
The Editors. “International Ladies Garment Workers Union”. Updated March 1, 2009. https://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/international-ladies-garment-workers-union
Authored by Kyle Brinster
The British ocean liner RMS Queen Mary entering New York Harbor in June 1936.
Ocean liners like the Royal Mail Ship (RMS) Queen Mary have a long history and deep connection with New York City. Beginning with the British government’s grant to Samuel Cunard “for the carriage of mail by steamship across the North Atlantic in 1838” (Pike 2018, 59), both passengers and merchants moving cargo used the ships scheduled arrival and departure times to reliably navigate across the world’s oceans. Continue reading
Pictured above is a copy of correspondence from 1979 between the director of the Trenton Free Public Library, Ms. Veronica Cary, and local Trenton sociologist and historian, Mr. Peter Peroni II. The initial letter from Mr. Peroni urges the library to purchase his book, The Burg: An Italian-American Community at Bay in Trenton, which Ms. Cary subsequently agreed to purchase. This book was the first formal academic study on the Chambersburg neighborhood located in East Trenton. At the time of the book’s publication, Chambersburg was a working- and middle-class Italian neighborhood in a city that was shifting to an African-American and Hispanic majority. In 1980, a year after the publication of Mr. Peroni’s book, the population of Trenton was about 46 % Non-Hispanic White, 45 % African-American, and 8 % Hispanic (Gibson and Jung 2005, 79). By contrast, the demographic makeup of Trenton in 2019 was 14 % Non-Hispanic White, 48 % African-American, and 36 % Hispanic (Data USA 2019). Like many American cities, the flight of White residents to suburbia was a major cultural and historical shift and is reflected in the materials in the collection of the Trentoniana archive in the Trenton Free Public Library.
Continue readingAuthored by Katie Ranno
My Academic Service-Learning (AS-L) project has been focused on gathering more information about the Dutchman review pictured above. The object was written by William B. Harris, a writer of many talents, including that of theatre reviews. He died in the year 2000 (Brown 2001, 2). Marymount College has since received a number of his works, and now it is their mission to keep his writings alive and accessible so that the general public can learn about part of New York’s theatre history through his writings.
This particular production of Dutchman took place at the Perry Street Theatre with performances beginning on February 10, 1977 (Salem 1984, 46). The one-act play was written in 1963 by LeRoi Jones (also known as Imamu Amiri Baraka) tells the story of a white woman named Lula and a black man named Clay who become interested in each other while sitting on a subway (Als 2007, 1). However, preconceived notions cloud their judgments, taking the play in a direction that tackles class, gender, and race head on.
Continue readingAuthored by Stephanie Hilfiker
The graphic novel Princess Princess Ever After by Katie O’Neill. This graphic novel depicts diverse races, gender expressions, sexual orientations, and representations of love and acceptance. O’Neill, Katie. 2016. Princess Princess Ever After. Portland, OR: Oni Press, Inc.
Recently there have been inclusivity movements throughout multiple industries, but how is representation fairing in literary circles, specifically in graphic novels? There is not always as much diversity in books as there is in real life. There is still a lack of representation of different genders, races, and abilities in young adult and children’s literature.
Graphic novels, sometimes described as long comic books, have been a growing medium for years. Graphic novel sales have been on the rise, “up 17.2 percent in 2015-2016” (Batten 2018, 64). With increasing sales numbers, it is certainly expected that there should be more diverse representation within the medium.
Looking at this year’s School Library Journal’s “Top 10 graphic Novels”, seven of the ten include minority characters, underrepresented populations, or characters dealing with serious issues that were once seen as taboo subjects. Even though this is a step in the right direction, there are other ways in which the medium could use proper representation (Alverson et al. 2018, 40-44).
One great example of representation is in Katie O’Neill’s Princess Princess Ever After, cover pictured above. It is a story about two princesses, each different in attitude and expression. One chooses to be a tough yet compassionate warrior and one chooses to be effeminate and perky. As the story goes on and the princesses solve problems together, they fall in love. The characters embody diverse gender expressions, body types, races, and sexual orientation in positive ways that are typically underrepre-sented in children’s literature. According to the Kirkus Review (2016), the author, “challenges conventions with every twist of the plot but doesn’t veer into heavy-handed preachiness that pulls readers out of the story,” showing that we can have diversity without trying too hard to represent everyone. Diversity can be done naturally because it is natural.
While representation in this specific graphic novel is diverse, there is still one specific area of representation under scrutiny: inclusion of people with disabilities. In a study done by the American Association of School Libraries, the authors looked at a sample of 30 graphic novels and noticed only twelve graphic novels contained characters with disabilities. Of those 16 characters, only three were seen as “inclusive members of their communities” (Irwin and Moeller 2010, 8-9). In their conclusion, Irwin and Moeller say that even though people with disabilities are represented, they are not represented well.
This sentiment is also expressed in Queer Media Images: LGBT Perspectives. The authors, Guthrie, Kunkel, and Hladky, point out that, when it comes to people who identify as LGBT in media, people need to see themselves in the characters, and if they do not, then the representation is not of good quality. When it comes to representation, we need characters who are positively complex and do not perpetuate stereotypes that harm the images of underrepresented communities (2013, 21). There is still work to be done in the realm of representation, but we as a society are working on it, and that is encouraging.
Resources
Alverson, Brigid, Robin Brenner, Johanna Draper Carlson, Lori Henderson, Esther Keller, Mike Pawuk, and Scott Robins. 2018. “Top 10 Graphic Novels.” School Library Journal 64, no. 12: 40-42. https://jerome.stjohns.edu/login?url=https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=tfh&AN=133354601&site=ehost-live
Batten, Tom. 2018. “Graphic Novels Survey 2018,” Library Journal 143, no. 20: 64. https://jerome.stjohns.edu/login?url=https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=aph&AN=133516363&site=ehost-live
Guthrie, Jennifer A., Adrienne Kunkel, and K. Nicole Hladky. 2013. “The Complex Relationship Between (and Within) the Oppressed and the Empowered: Contradiction and LGBT Portrayals on The L Word“ In Queer Media Images: Lgbt Perspectives, edited by Jane Campbell and Theresa Carilli, 19-29. Lanham: Lexington Books. PDF.
Irwin, Marilyn and Robin Moeller. 2010. “Seeing Different: Portrayals of Disability in Young Adult Graphic Novels,” School Library Media Research 13. https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ888377.pdf
Kirkus Reviews. 2016. Review of Princess Princess Ever After, by Katie O’Neill. https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/katie-oneill/princess-princess-ever-after/