Building Little Italy  Building Little Italy: Philadelphia's Italians before Mass Migration is a 1998 nonfiction book by Richard N. Juliani, published by Penn State University Press. The book discusses Italian immigration to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania from its beginnings in the 1750s through the 1870s. The book discusses the individual Italian Americans and the social issues the early Italian American community faced. John Zucchi of McGill University wrote that "Building Little Italy" was against the practice of being "filiopietistic", or members of an ethnic group emphasizing "the presence of their "tribe" in a particular locale from the early history of a European presence in that locus" in order "to bolster the community or to respond to a perceived self-disesteem of their ethnic group". Stefano Luconi of the University of Florence wrote that this book differed from a trend of most research of Italian Americans being "a hagiographic defense of Italian immigrants' contributions to the cultural, political, and economic development of American society to counter negative stereotypes of Italians as foreigners incapable of assimilation into their adoptive country." Juliani is a professor of sociology at Villanova University. Juliani began his research career in the mid-1960s, and had researched Philadelphia's Italian community for 30 years prior to the publication of the book. The book uses many sources related to Father Antonio Isoleri, who, from 1870 through 1926, served as the pastor of an Italian American church in Little Italy, Saint Mary Magdalen dei Pazzi Church, America's first Italian ethnic church. These sources include notes, sermons, letters, plays, and poems, with a total of over 20,000 pages. Other sources used include newspapers, Immigration and Naturalization Services (INS) documents, and U.S. Census documents. As of 1999, the Italians in the United States in the 1880-1940 and post 1940 periods had received more scholarly attention than those pre-1880, and as of 2000 most researchers begin at 1880. The book's subjects are skilled northern Italians, while the more commonly studied later immigrants were mostly southern Italians who had less skills and education than the previous group. The book has an introduction and eight chapters. The first describes what is known about the people who lived in the earliest Italian settlements in Philadelphia while chapters two through eight discuss how the community evolved. The book has one chapter dedicated to Little Italy during the discussed time period; Zucchi stated that this chapter "is particularly useful as a reconstruction of an ethnic neighbourhood." The book also discusses how Philadelphia's Italian community responded to the American Civil War and the Italian unification, and Michael Miller Topp of the University of Texas El Paso argued that this "political dimension" was "one of the greatest strengths of his book."