La Sentinella = the Sentinel (Bridgeport, Conn.) 191?-1948
Historic newspapers carry the language, views and graphic reporting of their time, including racist content. They are shown to teen and adult profiles.
1,209 issues from 1920 to 1948, published in Bridgeport, Connecticut, digitised for Chronicling America.
In November 1977, the Bridgeport Post noted that when Italian immigrants began flocking to “the Park City” in the 1890s and 1900s, they “encountered a solid wall of prejudice and open hatred.” Fortunately, the beleaguered immigrants soon found a sense of community and a source of civic pride in the city’s Italian-language newspapers.
The weekly La Sentinella was not the first newspaper to try to unite a factionalized Italian-American community. La Tribuna del Connecticut, established in 1906,was one such outlet, along with Il Sole, founded around the same time. Although the exact start date of La Sentinella is unknown, a Hartford Courant obituary for Bridgeport newspaperman J.V. Massey, formerly the owner of Il Sole, suggests that it might have been in 1913 or 1914, the year when Massey sold his interest in the paper.
When compared to other Italian-language newspapers of the time, La Sentinella was longer, with some issues extending to a full eight pages. Interestingly, during the early 1920s, each issue included a page dedicated to news from the Italian American community of Port Chester, New York.
Of note, La Sentinella consistently offered a critical perspective on news of the day, particularly about their own colonia (colony). In an article that appeared just before Christmas 1930, when Bridgeport was reeling from the Depression, an unsigned editorial lamented that few in the city’s sizeable Italian American community were using their organizing skills and fraternal…
- Genres
- News
- Published in
- Bridgeport, Connecticut, United States
- Collection
- Chronicling America
- Licence or status
- None stated by the archive
- Rights
- The Library of Congress believes that the newspapers in Chronicling America are in the public domain or have no known copyright restrictions. Newspapers published in the United States more than 95 years ago are in the public domain in their entirety.
- Credit
- Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers, Library of Congress and the National Endowment for the Humanities
- Who can read it
- Teens profiles and older (placed by Invisible Network from what the archive says; archives give no ratings)
- Archive
- Library of Congress