Home | Valente and DiRenzo Family History - Historical Background - Molise and Camden Chronology
ITALY and AMERICA
History Outline somewhat focused on
the Region of Molise, Italy,
and the City of Camden, New Jersey
Page Two
- On this page: 1950 A.D. - Present, with End Notes and Bibliography.
- Chronology: 753 B.C. - 1949 A.D., with Preface.
- Summary Outline of the History of Molise.
Chronology: 1950 A.D. - Present
1950 A.D. |
The Italian Parliament establishes the Cassa per il Mezzogiorno (Development Fund for the South of Italy). Money is made available for infrastructure projects: dams, aqueducts, irrigation works. Paved roads and piped water (and indoor plumbing) are finally brought to poor southern villages. However, the Development Fund does little to reduce the South's high unemployment. Gambatesa will be connected to water and sewer lines in circa 1957-1960. (Decades later the municipal fountain is closed in order to force people to pay for piped water, although the fountain has since been re-opened, although of course people no longer fetch their water from there as they did in the old days.) |
1951 A.D. | Twenty-four per cent of southern Italians over the age of six are still illiterate according to the 9th Italian national census. Gambatesa is recorded as having 3,164 residents; there are 737 households in the village. |
1957 A.D. |
On 25 March the Treaty of Rome is signed by Belgium, France, Germany, Holland, Italy and Luxembourg, establishing the European Economic Community (EEC) on 1 January 1958. Boris Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago is published in Italy in Russian and Italian; the manuscript has been smuggled out of the USSR and this is the novel's first appearance in print. Pasternak's book urges that common humanity is more important than political ideology. The book will be condemned by the Soviet government, but its author will be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1958. |
Late 1950s Early 1960s A.D. | Mussolini's law (unconstitutionally retained) that prohibits farm workers from abandoning agriculture is abolished. About 2 million southern Italians migrate to northern industrial jobs, leaving behind the old, women and children to inhabit the southern villages. |
1958 A.D. | Pope Pius XII is succeeded by Pope John XXIII. |
1959 A.D. | Giovanni Valente and Nunziata DiRenzo move from 520 Mickle Street (City of Camden) to 162 Wesley Avenue in the Erlton section of Delaware Township (the name of which is changed to Cherry Hill Township in 1960). |
1960 A.D. | Giovanni Valente makes his first return visit to Gambatesa on 28 August with his daughter Esther (1930-1994) and his brother Donato's daughter Anna VALENTE (called "Anna-v"). |
1961 A.D. | The 10th Italian national census records 3,039 residents of Gambatesa. Of Italy's population of 53 million, about 20 million live in the South (the islands and the mainland south of Rome). |
1962 A.D. |
The Second Vatican Council. Pope John XXIII declares freedom of conscience and democratic government -- things the Church's hierarchy has long opposed -- to be Christian virtues. In response to a request from the prime minister, the United States removes its nuclear missiles from Italy. After the next election the Christian Democrats enter into coalition with the socialists. |
1963 A.D. |
Molise is separated from the region of Abruzzo and made a region in its own right, co-extensive with the province of Campobasso, on 27 December. Between 1951 and 1954 the average income in the south had been 47 per cent of what it was in the northwest of Italy; in the period from 1963 to 1966 it will fall to 43 per cent. Pope John XIII is succeeded by Pope Paul VI (r. until 1978). |
1964 A.D. | On 2 July President Johnson (L.B.J.) signs the Civil Rights Act of 1964 into law. |
1965 A.D. | On 30 July President Johnson signs Medicare and on 6 August the Voting Rights Act into law. |
1967 A.D. | Nunziata DiRenzo visits Gambatesa with Giovanni Valente. They arrive back at New York City on 6 September. |
1968 A.D. | On 11 April President Johnson signs Civil Rights Act of 1968 into law. |
1969 A.D. |
Agricultural workers have by now declined to little more than 4 million. This is one-half what the number was twenty years ago. In the south of Italy a traditional peasant and artisan world is being replaced by a so-called modern consumer society. A new Roman Calendar of Saints is published. It replaces the Roman Martyrology of 1584, and makes old collected lives of the saints and histories difficult to correlate. |
1970 A.D. | Molise is divided into two provinces: Campobasso and Isernia (to the east). The Comune of Gambatesa is in the Province of Campobasso. |
1971 A.D. | Nunziata DiRenzo revisits Gambatesa in August with her daughter Esther VALENTE and the writer of this Web page. |
1976 A.D. | Two-hundredth anniversary of Thomas Jefferson's American Declaration of Independence. |
1978 A.D. | Pope Paul VI is succeeded by Pope John Paul I (reigns for 33 days), who is succeeded by Pope John Paul II (born Karol Wojtyla in 1920 in Wadowice, Poland) (r. until 2005). |
1991 A.D. | The 13th Italian national census records 2,045 residents of Gambatesa. |
1995 A.D. | On 28 December Italy's constitutional court overturns a law which had made begging illegal. "It's not a crime to be poor," a judge says. |
2001 A.D. |
The 14th Italian national census (censimento, conducted on 21 October) records 1,737 residents of Gambatesa. The total population of the Republic of Italy is now 56,995,744. (There are 20 Regions, 103 Provinces, and 8,101 Comuni in the present Republic of Italy.) In October the United States of America invades Afghanistan. This will turn into the longest war in U.S. history. |
2002 A.D. |
On 31 October there is a large earthquake in the Province of Campobasso. The roof of a school collapses in San Giuliano di Puglia, killing many young children. 12 miles to the south of San Giuliano, Gambatesa is barely damaged by the earthquake. The birthrate in Italy, at 1.2 births per 1,000 people, is now the lowest in the world. The number of children under the age of 15 is 14.5% of the population, the second lowest percent in the world. It is forecast that by 2025, over 25% of Italy's population will be 65 or older. |
2003 A.D. | The 55th anniversary of the United Nations' Universal Declaration of Human Rights. |
2004 A.D. |
18.9% of Italy's population is now 65 years of age or older. On November 11 Palestinian resistance leader Yasser Arafat (born 1929 in Jerusalem) dies, and is denied burial in East Jerusalem by the occupying authority. In 1947-48 political Zionists (Jewish nationalists pursuing a secular idea of Theodor Herzl's from the 19th Century) had driven three-quarters of a million native Palestinians, including 50,000 Christians, from their homes and destroyed four-hundred native Palestinian villages so that the displaced people would have nothing to return to, and since the Zionist conquest of June 1967 the little territory (East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza) that remained to the natives of Palestine has been subjected to a brutal occupation and blockade and in many instances annexation. By 2007 almost half the Palestinians in the "occupied territories" will be suffering from malnutrition. Since the establishment of the Jewish-nationalist state in Palestine the Christian population of Palestine has decreased from 15% to less than 2% and Christians are now a minority in Bethlehem. The rulers of both the United States and Italy pay ineffectual mouth honor to "peace", a Carthaginian Peace (unconditional surrender by the Palestinians and abandonment of their right of return to their homeland), but say nothing about justice for the victims of political Zionism, an ideology which Western governments fully support. The complete insincerity of the Zionist government as well as the fawning complicity (dishonest brokering) of the U.S. Congress in the so-called peace process will be revealed by WikiLeaks in a U.S. Embassy Cable of 28 April 2009. The so-called Road Map to Peace is all dead ends and dead Palestinians. The equivalent would be if black South Africans had been told that they must recognize a White State of South Africa and in return they would be allowed a semi-sovereign Black State of whatever scraps of land the whites did not want. The only just solution for Palestine is the South African solution of a single democratic state. |
2005 A.D. |
On 19 April Pope John Paul II is succeeded by Pope Benedict XVI (born Josef Ratzinger in 1927 (in Marktl Am Inn) of Traunstein, Bavaria, Germany). On 1 July Italy's Defence Ministry permits the discharge of all drafted soldiers, effectively ending compulsory national service (nowadays 10 months). The draft had begun in 1800 under Napoleon in the northwest and had been extended to the whole of Italy following Unification; the Italian parliament had passed legislation in 2000 to abolish it. National service had been required of all men under the age of 45 (and dual citizens under the age of 27 could not permanently reside in Italy, except to study, without serving in the Italian Armed Forces). |
2007- 2008 A.D. | On 27 April Mstislav Rostropovich, born 27 March 1927, dies. On 3 August 2008 Russian author Alexander Solzhenitsyn, born 11 December 1918, dies. |
2010 A.D. | In the year 1740 the Enlightenment ruler Frederick the Great of Prussia abolished torture in his realm. But in November the former U.S. president admits to being a Class-A war criminal by boasting in his published memoirs that he personally ordered a man to be tortured. Yet neither he nor any of the many others implicated in U.S. crimes against humanity since September 2001 has been called to account by that president's successor in office, thus demonstrating that there will be no going back to the rule of law: crimes against humanity are now standard government policy. |
2011 A.D. |
The 15th Italian national census of 9 October counts 1,487 residents of Gambatesa. On 31 October Palestine is voted into UNESCO despite the U.S. government voting "no" (on the pretext of a fictitious "Middle East peace process") and the government of Italy abstaining. |
2013 A.D. | After Pope Benedict XVI stands down on 28 February, Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio (born 17 December 1936 in Buenos Aires, Argentina, to Italian immigrant parents), Archbishop of the dioceses of Buenos Aires, is elected on 13 March, and takes the name Pope Francis I, in honor of the patron saint of Italy, Saint Francis of Assisi (San Francesco d'Assisi), "il Poverello". Bishop Bergoglio had been made a Cardinal of the Title of San Roberto Bellarmino (Outline 1599 A.D., for Saint Robert Bellarmine; Saint Francis, 1182-1226) by Pope John Paul II in 2001. Pope Francis is the 266th pope after Jesus' disciple Peter. |
2017 A.D. |
2 November 2017 is the 100th anniversary of the Balfour Declaration, a letter of sixty-seven words that gave "the Land of Palestine" to the Jews by taking it away from the native population of Palestine (the Palestinians). Far from asking forgiveness, the British government, which has never taken responsibility for the potato famine in which one million of its Irish subjects died ("God created the blight; the British created the famine"), not only takes responsibility for having made the Declaration but praises itself for having done so. On 22 February 2018 the U.S. government will declare its intention to move its embassy to Jerusalem. The Zionists seized East Jerusalem in June 1967 and have since annexed it. |
2018 A.D. |
15 May marks the 70th anniversary of the Palestinian dispossession and dispersal (Al-Nakba, "The Catastrophe"). As always quite indifferent to international law, the Zionist government has killed at least 59 and wounded 2,700 Gazans who were peacefully demanding the Palestinians' right of return to their homeland (Great March of Return), and on 14 May the U.S. government moves its embassy to Jerusalem. In September the U.S. government forces the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) to close its U.S. office. The U.S. stops funding the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) which provides the only food, schooling and medical care to 5 million Palestinians in refugee camps. The U.S. government's aim is to deny these Palestinians their Right of Return by claiming that the children of displaced persons aren't displaced persons (This is the cultural genocide demanded by Deuteronomy 7.1-6; the physical genocide also demanded by those verses has for many years now has been undertaken by the Zionist Jews in Palestine itself). Together with the Zionists' theft of East Jerusalem and the West Bank, as well as the Zionist blockade of Gaza to make Gaza unlivable, is the final stage in the dispossession of Palestine's native population of its homeland in Palestine. Without U.S. government support, none of this could be happening. Meanwhile at home the U.S. government works on legislation to make criticism of political Zionism equivalent to antisemitism and to persecute or outlaw supporters of the Boycott, Divest, Sanction (BDS) movement as well as university supporters of the Palestinians, so little does the First Amendment to the United States Constitution, which recognizes man's God-given right to freedom of conscience, mean to U.S. government. |
2019 A.D. |
![]() June 4th marks the 30th anniversary of the massacre in Tiananmen Square (8964) and mass imprisonment of free speech, free press and democracy advocates, Liu Xiaobo among them. But there is no international consequence for the PRC, a totalitarian state that is enabled by the economic greed of Western powers to do anything its government wants both internally and externally, including its religious and cultural genocide against the Uyghurs and Tibetans, and continued persecution of Falun Gong, Christianity, and Islam. |
2020 A.D. |
On 11 June the city government of Camden, New Jersey, removes (and fractures) the statue of Christopher Columbus from Farnham Park. It was Columbus's vision to sail west to go East, despite the risk of never returning, and had it not been for the Americas, Columbus's three small ships would have sailed off into the Pacific Ocean, and been forgotten by history. The Camden city government has not so far removed the schools, the libraries, the hospitals and universities, the infrastructure (roads, communication, plumbing, electricity), the ideals of democracy, human rights and equality before the law, and all the other gifts of European civilization which Columbus symbolizes, the removing of which would return America to a romanticized Stone Age, the world of illiterate primitive man that existed before the Europeans came. The explorer Columbus discovered the Western Hemisphere on 12 October 1492 (formerly Columbus Day in America), landing at the island of San Salvador in the Bahamas, having set sail from Spain on 3 August 1492. The subsequent arrival of European conquerors was as catastrophic for the native population of the Americas as it was for the native populations of Africa and Asia. |
2021 A.D. | The 16th Italian national census of 31 December counts 1,283 legal residents of Gambatesa. The next national census will be in 2026. |
2022 A.D. |
On 17 June, on a Friday afternoon, the time governments hide their most shameful acts, Britain's minister of the interior approves the extradition of WikiLeaks' Julian Assange to the United States of America, a place where the current president has labeled Assange "a high tech terrorist". On 31 December Pope emeritus Benedict XVI dies. |
2023 A.D. | 800th anniversary of Saint Francis of Assisi's first staging of the Nativity in the caves of Greccio. (Japan's hidden Christians and Christmas Eve in the stable.) |
- Chronology: 753 B.C. - 1949 A.D.
Source Note: Many of the facts for the year 1860 forward were taken from Denis Mack Smith's Italy: A Modern History (Ann Arbor: 1969). But that author should not be blamed for my opinions about the meanings of those facts.
My general view of history is that common people are subjects, not masters of the governments they live under, and that no government is to be identified with the country it rules. Only politicians and journalists are confused about this.
Other Sources: Some of the more recent sources, that is, those I can remember, for my historical outline are listed below in no special order.
- James Brodrick's Saint Francis Xavier (1957).
- New Britannica Encyclopaedia, 1991, "italy", "camden".
- Omer Engelbert's The Lives of the Saints (tr. Christopher and Anne Fremantle) (New York: 1951).
- Ralph Flenley's Makers of Nineteenth-Century Europe (New York: 1927).
- Richard McCormick's New Jersey from Colony to State 1609-1789 (Princeton, NJ: 1964). (The New Jersey historical series).
- Collier's Encyclopedia, 1994, "camden".
- Encyclopedia Americana, 1996, "camden".
- Strayer and Munro's The Middle Ages 395-1500 4th ed (New York: 1959).
- Wilbur Cross's Ghost Ship of the Pole: the incredible story of the dirigible Italia ..., with Foreword by Stefansson (New York: 1960).
- Alexander McKee's Ice Crash (New York: 1979).
- Sunday New York Times, 18 July 1926, page 12.
- Benedetto Croce's History of the Kingdom of Naples (tr. Frances Frenaye).
- Will Durant's Caesar and Christ (New York, 1944) and The Age of Faith (New York, 1950). (The Story of Civilization; volumes 3 and 4).
- Denis Mack Smith's Italy: A Modern History (Ann Arbor: 1969).
- G.W.L. Nicholson's The Canadians in Italy, 1943-1945 (Ottawa: 1957). Pages 241-243. (Official History of the Canadian Army in the Second World War; volume 2).
- Catholic University of America's New Catholic Encyclopedia (New York: 1967-1979).
- Henri Marrou's Saint Augustine and his influence through the ages (tr. Hepburne-Scott and Edmund Hill) (London: 1957). ([Longman's] Men of wisdom).
- Rudolph Vecoli's The People of New Jersey (Princeton, NJ: 1965). (The New Jersey historical series).
- Vincent Cronin's Italy (New York: 1972) (Horizon Concise History; chapter viii, p. 157, 163) .
- Hanks and Hodges' A Dictionary of Surnames (Oxford: 1988).
- Luc Cuyver's Into the Rising Sun (New York: 1999).
- James Brodrick's Robert Bellarmine, saint and scholar (Westminster, Maryland: 1961).
- Giambattista Masciotta's Il Molise dalle origini ai nostri giorni, Vol. II (Napoli: 1915).
- Michael Prior's Zionism and the State of Israel: a moral inquiry (London: 1999).
- Ignazio Silone's Emergency Exit (New York: 1968).
- Encyclopedia Americana, in 30 volumes, 1954.
- Oxford Classical Dictionary, 2nd ed., 1970.
The URL of this Web page: https://www.roangelo.net/valente/outline2.html
Last revised: 28 October 2023 : 2023-10-28 by Robert Wesley Angelo.
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