Hi everyone! My name is Angel Cramer and I’m a rising senior History major with a minor in German and certificates in Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies and Central European Studies. In my free time, I love trying different food around Pittsburgh with my friends and needle felting. I’m also trying to propagate an army of basil plants this summer for my pesto-making endeavors.

I am incredibly grateful for the opportunity the Brackenridge Fellowship is giving me to conduct research full-time this summer. My project is tentatively titled “Italian Fascism and the American Dream: The National Politics of Pittsburgh’s Italian American Prominenti, 1918-1941,” and I’m excited to continue working with the endless support of Dr. Lina Insana and Dr. Gregor Thum. I’m ultimately hoping to see how sociopolitical developments in Fascist Italy related to Italian Americans’ local political aspirations in Pittsburgh during the interwar era. This research involves examining Pittsburgh’s two primary Italian-language newspapers, La Trinacria and Unione, in addition to other archival materials at the Heinz History Center. I aim to expand the research I conduct throughout this fellowship into a senior thesis.

This project was partly inspired by two other projects I worked on last year. I was a research assistant for Dr. Insana’s “Columbus, Interrupted” project where I worked with other undergraduates to examine the five-decade-long planning process and funding sources for the 1958 Schenley Park Columbus statue. Last summer I also worked on a research project with Dr. Thum’s mentorship to examine Italian-speaking socialists’ positions on internationalism and nationalism after the city of Trieste became part of Italy in 1918. Italian Fascism became a significant factor in both of these projects, and I was interested in examining it more closely. I am especially curious about the role Fascism’s antisocialist positions played in a US context as well as how the Italian American community reacted to Italy’s 1935 invasion of Ethiopia. 

Indebted to prior scholarship covering topics such as Italian American Fascism, Italian American political involvement in Pennsylvania, and broader ties between the US and Italy through migration, I hope that my project can shed light on how far-right movements like Fascism can emerge and become normalized within democratic systems by using interwar Pittsburgh as a case study. Taking the Brackenridge fellowship as a jumping-off point, I also want to continue sharing my love of history with others and improving my ability to conduct research more broadly. The interdisciplinary aspect of Brackenridge is particularly important to me as I want to make history more accessible and appealing to a wide audience through my future academic and career paths.