Dear Friends, I am delighted to inform you that our July 27 program, “Columbus on Trial,” is now available on the web. We had approximately 170 people who watched it live. As you will see, the program revolves around the notion of how can and/or should we discuss Christopher Columbus, especially in this post-George Floyd murder. For a copy of the film, please go to: www.BongiornoProductions.com. To view our discussion, please click here.

Columbus on Trial received a film grant from The Russo Brothers Italian American Film Forum. Filmmakers Marylou & Jerome Bongiorno wish to thank: Columbus Citizens Foundation, National Italian American Foundation (NIAF), Italian Sons and Daughters of America (ISDA), Russo Brothers, Francesco & Mary Giambelli Foundation, New Jersey Italian Heritage Commission (NJIHC), Commission for Social Justice, OSDIA, Coccia Foundation, Italian Heritage and Culture Committee-NY, Garibaldi-Meucci Museum.

In addition, I also wanted to offer a small bibliography of works that look at different facets of the Christopher Columbus National Discussion. There are numerous others as well, but these are some works with which I have some familiarity:

Bowden, Thomas A. 2003. The Enemies of Christopher Columbus. Cresskill, NJ: The Paper Tiger.
Connell, William J. 2018. “Italians in the Early Atlantic World.” In The Routledge History of the Italian Americans. Edited by William J. Connell and Stanislao Pugliese. New York: Routledge. 17-41.
Delany, Carol. 2011. Columbus and the Quest for Jerusalem: How Religion Drove the Voyages that Led to America. New York: Free Press.
Deschamps, B. 2001. “Italian-Americans and Columbus Day: A Quest for Consensus Between National and Group Identities, 1840–1910.” In Celebrating Ethnicity and Nation: American Festive Culture from the Revolution to the Early Twentieth Century. Edited by J. Heideking, G. Fabre, & K. Dreisbach. New York: Berghahn Books. 124–139.
Kadir, Djelal. 1992. Columbus and the Ends of the Earth. Europe’s Prophetic Rhetoric As Conquering Ideology. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Kubal, Timothy. 2008. Cultural Movements and Collective Memory: Christopher Columbus and the Rewriting of the National Origin Myth. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Mignone, Mario, ed. 1993. Columbus: Meeting of Cultures. Stony Brook: FILibrary.
“Monuments, Public Memory, and Group Identity: The Cultural Politics of Italian America in the Twentieth-First Century”. 2017. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3IegDtdczYo&t =3067s.
Ruberto, Laura E. and Joseph Sciorra. 2020. “Toppling Columbus, Recasting Italian Americans” in Process: A Blog for American History. July 23. https://www.processhistory.org/rubertosciorra-toppling-columbus/.
Ruberto, Laura E. and Joseph Sciorra. 2020. “‘Columbus Might Be Dwarfed to Obscurity’: Italian Americans’ Engagement with Columbus Monuments in a Time of Decolonization.” In Public Memory in the Context of Transnational Migration and Displacement. Edited by Marschall S. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. 61-93.

Buona visione e buona lettura!

Un caloroso saluto