Drawing on the philosophy of Martin Heidegger, Julian Thomas develops a way of writing about the past in which time is seen as central to the emergence of the identities of people and objects.

With a growing interest in ethnicity, there has also been an increasing interest in the study of material culture, as a means of explicating traditional and popular culture. Moreover, the decades leading up to the Columbian Quincentenary have been marked by the establishment of new Italian American museums, cultural centers, and archival collections. This timely publication, the fourth in Greenwood's series of Material Culture Directories, complements existing Italian American and Italian Canadian bibliographies and guides to collections by focusing on material culture and photographic...