Review too: Richard N. Juliani, Little Italy in the Great War: Philadelphia’s Italians on the Battlefield and Home Front. (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2019)

Focusing on Philadelphia, which was then home to the second most populous Italian American community in the nation, Richard N. Juliani offers an authoritative case study for the impact of World War I on Italian immigrants and their progeny in the United States. He draws primarily upon the city's English-language newspapers (in particular, the Philadelphia Evening Public Ledger) and La Libera Parola (but overlooks other local Italian-language weeklies such as Il Momento, La Ragione, and La Rassegna) to detail individual stories that illuminate the experience of Philadelphians of Italian extraction in training camps and in the trenches with the American Expeditionary Force along the French-German front. Moreover, he reconstructs the activities of women from Italian background who contributed to the war efforts of their native and adoptive countries as they worked in defense industries, promoted the purchase of U.S. Liberty Bonds to fund Washington's military machinery, and collected money for the families of Italian and American soldiers.