Rudolph J. Vecoli, an Italian-American historian whose searching
chronicles of the American immigrant experience gave a new view of what
immigrants kept and left behind, died Sunday in St. Louis Park, Minn. He was 81
and lived in
The cause was
complications of leukemia, said his daughter, Lisa.
As director for
many years of the Immigration
History Research Center at the University
of Minnesota and in numerous scholarly articles and books, including
The People of New Jersey (1965), and A Century of American
Immigration, 1884 to 1984, Mr. Vecoli
argued against the notion that immigrants to the United States left their
cultures behind and did their best to blend into mainstream American society.
Rather, he wrote, they clung tenaciously to their traditions and developed
strategies to retain their heritage and resist pressures to embrace the Americ an social and economic
system.
Mr. Vecoli was born in
After
teaching briefly at Rutgers and the University
of Illinois, Mr. Vecoli joined the
Mr.
Vecoli devoted himself to retrieving, as he put it,
ethnic histories of which we know little or nothing. In his zeal to
rescue documents, he would put on a pair of overalls and search through the
attics and basements of potential donors.
The
centers holdings include items as varied as the business records of the
Swiss-Italian Sausage Factory in
In
the early 1990s, the center acquired the records of Libero Pensiero, or Free
Thought, a fraternal organization in
Mr.
Vecoli was president of the American Italian Historical Association
from 1966 to 1970 and of the Immigration and Ethnic History Society from 1982 to 1985. He
was also a founder of both organizations. From 1983 to 2003 he was
chairman of the history committee advising the Statue of Liberty-Ellis Island
Foundation.
He
is survived by his former wife, Jill, and his daughter, Lisa, both of