Il progetto delle colonie agricole negli Stati Uniti della grande emigrazione.

Most investigations on Sicilian immigrants in the United States at the turn of the Twentieth century have focused primarily on the study of the communities that chose to settle in the large industrial milieu of the Atlantic belt, as if the transition from farm to industrial worker represented a physiological process inscribed in the unstoppable march of history. The research aims at showing that this outcome was actually the consequence of the failure of the forecasts and plans drawn by the U.S. and Italian governments. To investigate this trend, the paper offers a detailed examination of the tendencies as well as the ups and downs in the establishment of rural settlements in southern States based on the promotion of small landownership and intended to accommodate Sicilian immigrants. In explaining the ensuing failures, it highlights the role of the networks that caused a radical deconstruction from below of the ideological representations underlying these projects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]