In 1910, nearly half of Italian immigrants in the United States lived in cities and towns with fewer than 100,000 residents. Immigrants in these relatively small metropolitan areas developed ethnic communities like those that existed in larger cities, but they were sometimes also able to attain greater influence in the political, social, and commercial life. It is this class of communities, often neglected by scholars whose attention is drawn to the large metropolitan areas, that Bean explores in The Urban Colonists, a richly detailed history of Italian Americans in Utica, New York.