An archive of Italian life in California, built from people's own words.
Events
The programs the Institute has placed before its public, including a major conference on oral history and Italian America.
Featured announcement
In November 2005 the Institute convened the thirty eighth annual conference of the American Italian Historical Association in Los Angeles, under the title Speaking Memory: Oral History, Oral Culture and Italians in America. The conference ran from the third to the sixth of November.
Its subject was research in oral history, local history, ethnography and oral tradition as these relate to Italians in America. Sessions considered research methods, the uses to which that research is put, and the places where it happens, whether in a university, a community group or a public agency.
A conference on oral history is also a conference about method and responsibility. Bringing scholars, community researchers and public institutions into one room made the shared questions visible: who is recorded, who keeps the recording, and who gets to hear it. The Institute's own archive grew out of exactly those questions.
Music and dance
Workshops on instruments from the oral traditions of southern Italy, including the tambourine, the jaw's harp and the friction drum, alongside traditional dances from the pizzica to the tarantella.
Festival
A festival and symposium on the Italian Jewish experience, held in Los Angeles in the autumn of 2001.