The Bronx Italian American History Initiative (BIAHI) is a new oral history project established by researchers at Fordham University in 2016. Our goal is to capture the personal narratives of Italian and Italian Americans in an online archive that documents the Bronx neighborhoods where they settled, lived and worked throughout the 20th century.

Italian immigrants and their children made lasting contributions to the texture of life in the Bronx. They built churches and movie theaters, formed sports organizations and social clubs, and established small businesses that continue to thrive today. They are an essential part of Bronx and Fordham history.
We want to tell Italian American story: our interactive, public archive will showcase the complexity of the Italian American experience from a multiethnic perspective. Working with the Bronx African American History Project, our goal is to establish Fordham as a leader in community oral history and research.
With your contribution we can:
- Buy computers, cameras, audio recorders and software to record and digitize the interviews
- Fund student researchers to help us create the open-access digital archive
- Raise awareness of our project through community outreach and public events
- Tell your story!

The Bronx Italian American History Initiative (BIAHI) is a collaborative oral history research project that documents the stories of Italians and Italian Americans in the Bronx from the 20th century to today. The project has collected more than 40 historically significant interviews with community members and is currently building its extensive oral history database. In spite of COVID-19 challenges and budget limitations, the initiative is hard at work on its new community engaged project: the expansion of its visual archive through a new crowd-sourcing campaign and making its database resources fully searchable, available, and free for the community.
To keep us up and running, BIAHI is raising $20,000 to help cover the cost of keeping our current director of publicity and marketing and to hire a digital archivist. With this support, we will be able to continue our active dialogue with the Fordham and Bronx community and lastingly preserve what our oral history project has created. The support of our generous sponsors has nurtured our project since its very beginning. We hope that, once again, we can rely on your valuable contributions. Thank you for your support.

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