An Historical Commentary on the Italian Teachers Association Subsequent to the Recent Publication of its "Annual Reports": — A Review Essay —

The activities and the Annual Reports of the Italian Teachers Associa? tion of New York City mark a great milestone in the history of the teaching of Italian in this country. It is the first time that a large segment of the Italian community had become involved in promoting the language of its people.1 Instruction in Italian, incidentally, was already available in the colonial days. Carlo Bellini, the first university professor of modern languages, introduced it at the College of William and Mary in 1779. However, it was in the period between 1800 and 1860 that the study of the language reached its apex. Italy was then idolized and looked upon as the land of culture par excellence. Italian was offered in most of the colleges and universities functioning during these years and in hundreds of secondary schools in every state east of the Mississippi, with the possi? ble exception of Florida, and west of the river in Arkansas, Missouri, Iowa, Nebraska, Colorado, and California. In popularity it was second only to French. Among the personalities who at one time or another studied Italian were John Quincy Adams, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Henry David Thoreau, James Russell Lowell, Edward Everett Hale, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, William Cullen Bryant, James Fenimore Cooper, Margaret Fuller, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Julia Ward Howe, William Hickling Prescott, George