Close

Hartford will celebrate its first Indigenous Peoples Day in place of Columbus Day next month, the city council decided Monday in a vote that may set the stage for changes to other city memorials and monuments to the controversial Italian explorer. The Court of Common Council renamed the holiday at the recommendation of a city task force, which repo...

722

There won’t be a Columbus Day parade again this year, but the region’s Italian Americans plan to celebrate their rich heritage in a new way. “We had to kind of scale back, but we’re praying and hoping” to revive the parade in 2022, said Laura Florio Luzzi, chairwoman of the parade committee. “The town of East Haven is very excited about us coming.”...

362

The Conference of Presidents of Major Italian American Organizations (COPOMIAO) has denounced the decision of the New York Times’ Ad Acceptability Team to not run an advertisement promoting the Italian American community’s stance on current rhetoric against Christopher Columbus in advance of the Columbus Day holiday on October 11. The ad, which was...

1079

The City Council is expected to vote Monday on a proposal to replace Columbus Day with Indigenous Peoples’ Day. Though the city cannot officially change the holiday since it is a state holiday, this would be a resolution to recognize the day as Indigenous Peoples’ Day for city purposes. Ward 3 Councilor Heather Shand, who sponsored the Aug. 9 order...

797

School board officials were criticized on Tuesday after a motion to reinstate Columbus Day on the school calendar did not pass. More than 20 residents and local Italian American activists attended the Rockaway Township Board of Education meeting and spoke in support of the motion. Board members renamed the day Indigenous Peoples' Day after a board...

990

Poor Lawrence Brignolia is rolling over in his grave. The Italian-American won the Boston Marathon in 1899 with a time of 2:54:38. In 2000, he was elected to the National Italian American Sports Hall of Fame. That's quite an honor for a horse shoeing son of Italian immigrants, but there is no honor for Italian Americans at this year's Boston Marath...

776

It’s been 529 years since Christopher Columbus sailed the “ocean blue.” In all that time, this Columbus Day is probably the most important to the legacy of the embattled explorer. Monuments are in mothballs, school curricula are being “corrected” and holidays are being challenged across the country, and especially here in Chicago. That’s why this y...

698

Raise the trumpets and beat the drums. The 39th annual Brooklyn Columbus Parade, which is sponsored by the Federation of Italian American Organizations, will take place on Saturday, Oct. 9. It will likely be on a smaller scale due to the lingering effects of the coronavirus and the difficulty securing participation by some schools and bands. This y...

899

July 25 was the one-year-and-one-day anniversary of the removal of the Christopher Columbus statues by the City of Chicago. It was also the day Chicago’s Italian-American community turned out in droves to show unity and strength at the JCCIA’s “Pack the Park Italian Unity Day Rally.” “After all that has been going on with the Columbus issue and the...

665

Sailors in Christopher Columbus’s home town knew about North America more than a century before the explorer discovered the continent, Italian researchers have claimed. An account by Genoan sailors of a verdant land beyond Greenland “where giants live” has been found in a history of the world written around 1340 by an Italian friar — 152 years befo...

1082