Italians in the United States before 1880

Italians in America before 1880 included a number of explorers, starting with Christopher Columbus who discovered Puerto Rico on November 19, 1493. There also were a few small settlements. The first Italian to be registered as residing in the area corresponding to the current U.S. was Pietro Cesare Alberti, commonly regarded as the first Italian American, a Venetian seaman who, in 1635, settled in the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam, what would eventually become New York City. Enrico Tonti, together with the French explorer René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, explored the Great Lakes region. Tonti founded the first European settlement in Illinois in 1679 and in Arkansas in 1683, known as Poste de Arkansea, making him "The Father of Arkansas". With LaSalle, he co-founded New Orleans, and was governor of the Louisiana Territory for the next 20 years. His brother Alfonso Tonti, with French explorer Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac, was the co-founder of Detroit in 1701, and was its acting colonial governor for 12 years. The Taliaferro family (originally Tagliaferro), believed to have roots in Venice, was one of the First Families to settle Virginia.

In 1773–1785, Filippo Mazzei, a physician and was a close friend and confidant of Thomas Jefferson. He published a pamphlet containing the phrase, which Jefferson incorporated essentially intact into the Declaration of Independence: "All men are by nature equally free and independent. Such equality is necessary in order to create a free government. All men must be equal to each other in natural law". Italian Americans served in the American Revolutionary War both as soldiers and officers. Francesco Vigo aided the colonial forces of George Rogers Clark by serving as one of the foremost financiers of the Revolution in the frontier Northwest. Later, he was a co-founder of Vincennes University in Indiana. Between 5,000 and 10,000 Italian Americans fought in the American Civil War. The Garibaldi Guard recruited volunteers for the Union Army from Italy and other European countries to form the 39th New York Infantry. At the outbreak of the American Civil War, Giuseppe Garibaldi was a very popular figure. The great majority of Italian Americans, for both demographic and ideological reasons, served in the Union Army (including generals Edward Ferrero and Francis B. Spinola). Some Americans of Italian descent from the Southern states fought in the Confederate Army, such as General William B. Taliaferro (of English-American and Anglo-Italian descent) and P. G. T. Beauregard.

Giovanni Martino or Giovanni Martini, also known as John Martin was a soldier and trumpeter who served both in Italy with Giuseppe Garibaldi and in the United States Army, famously in the 7th Cavalry Regiment under George Armstrong Custer, where he became known as the only survivor from Custer's company at the Battle of the Little Bighorn. An immigrant, Antonio Meucci, brought with him a concept for the telephone. He is credited by many researchers with being the first to demonstrate the principle of the telephone in a patent caveat he submitted to the U.S. Patent Office in 1871; however, considerable controversy existed relative to the priority of invention, with Alexander Graham Bell also being accorded this distinction. (In 2002, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a resolution on Meucci (H.R. 269) declaring that "his work in the invention of the telephone should be acknowledged.").