Focusing on the immigrant family, this title brings together documents and commentary that is suitable for teaching United States history survey courses as well as immigration history and introductory sociology courses. It includes an introduction and epilogue.
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"Zahra handles this immensely complicated and multidimensional history with remarkable clarity and feeling." —Robert Levgold, Foreign Affairs Between 1846 and 1940, more than 50 million Europeans moved to the Americas in one of the largest migrations of human history, emptying out villages and irrevocably changing both their new homes and the ones they left behind. With a keen historical perspective on the most consequential social phenomenon of the twentieth century, Tara Zahra shows how the policies that gave shape to this migration provided the precedent for future events such as the Holocaust, the closing of the Iron Curtain, and the tragedies of ethnic cleansing. In the epilogue, she places the current refugee crisis within the longer history of migration.
Chronicles the experiences of immigrants in two iconic South Side Polish neighborhoods in Chicago to demonstrate how Poles created new communities in an attempt to preserve the customs of their homeland.
No way but out: German women in Mecklenburg / Monika Blaschke -- To be matched or to move: Irish women's prospects in Munster / Deirdre Mageean -- Maids in motion: Swedish women in Dalsland / Margareta Matovic -- Land and loyalties: contours of Polish women's lives / Maria Anna Knothe -- Creating a community: German-American women in Chicago / Christiane Harzig -- Making sense and providing structure: Irish-American women in the parish neighborhood / Deirdre Mageean -- Embracing a middle-class life: Swedish-American women in Lake View / Margareta Matovic -- Recent arrivals: Polish immigrant women's response to the city / Maria Anna Knothe.
"The editors have selected from both the grounding classics and the best new work to show how migration is transforming the rich democracies." Professor John Mollenkopf, The City University of New York --
Known for its pioneering studies of urban life, immigration, and criminality using the “city as laboratory,” the so-called Chicago school of sociology has been a dominant presence in American social science since it emerged around the University of Chicago in the early decades of the twentieth century. Canonical figures such as Robert Park, Everett Hughes, Howard S. Becker, and Erving Goffman established foundational principles of how to conduct social research. This groundbreaking book on the development and influence of the Chicago tradition, first published in 2001, became an immediate classic in France, where Chicago sociology has exerted significant appeal. Drawing on deep archival research and interviews with members of the tradition, Jean-Michel Chapoulie interrogates evidence with a historian’s eye and recognizes the profound effects that culture, society, and the economy have on individuals and institutions. His study is a fine-grained and panoramic portrait of the complex and interlocking factors that gave rise to the research interests and methodologies that characterized the Chicago tradition in the 1920s and that contributed to rises and falls in its predominance in American sociology over the following decades. Now revised and available for the first time in English, Chicago Sociology provides a unique perspective on the history of social science in the twentieth century. A foreword by William Kornblum places Chapoulie’s work in context and addresses recent critical challenges to the Chicago school and its origins.
How a German city became Polish after World War II With the stroke of a pen at the Potsdam Conference following the Allied victory in 1945, Breslau, the largest German city east of Berlin, became the Polish city of Wroclaw. Its more than six hundred thousand inhabitants—almost all of them ethnic Germans—were expelled and replaced by Polish settlers from all parts of prewar Poland. Uprooted examines the long-term psychological and cultural consequences of forced migration in twentieth-century Europe through the experiences of Wroclaw's Polish inhabitants. In this pioneering work, Gregor Thum tells the story of how the city's new Polish settlers found themselves in a place that was not only unfamiliar to them but outright repellent given Wroclaw's Prussian-German appearance and the enormous scope of wartime destruction. The immediate consequences were an unstable society, an extremely high crime rate, rapid dilapidation of the building stock, and economic stagnation. This changed only after the city's authorities and a new intellectual elite provided Wroclaw with a Polish founding myth and reshaped the city's appearance to fit the postwar legend that it was an age-old Polish city. Thum also shows how the end of the Cold War and Poland's democratization triggered a public debate about Wroclaw's "amputated memory." Rediscovering the German past, Wroclaw's Poles reinvented their city for the second time since World War II. Uprooted traces the complex historical process by which Wroclaw's new inhabitants revitalized their city and made it their own.
Thaddeus Kosciuszko, a Polish-Lithuanian born in 1746, was one of the most important figures of the modern world. Fleeing his homeland after a death sentence was placed on his head (when he dared court a woman above his station), he came to America one month after the signing of the Declaration of Independence, literally showing up on Benjamin Franklin's doorstep in Philadelphia with little more than a revolutionary spirit and a genius for engineering. Entering the fray as a volunteer in the war effort, he quickly proved his capabilities and became the most talented engineer of the Continental Army. Kosciuszko went on to construct the fortifications for Philadelphia, devise battle plans that were integral to the American victory at the pivotal Battle of Saratoga, and designed the plans for Fortress West Point—the same plans that were stolen by Benedict Arnold. Then, seeking new challenges, Kosciuszko asked for a transfer to the Southern Army, where he oversaw a ring of African-American spies. A lifelong champion of the common man and woman, he was ahead of his time in advocating tolerance and standing up for the rights of slaves, Native Americans, women, serfs, and Jews. Following the end of the war, Kosciuszko returned to Poland and was a leading figure in that nation's Constitutional movement. He became Commander in Chief of the Polish Army and valiantly led a defense against a Russian invasion, and in 1794 he led what was dubbed the Kosciuszko Uprising—a revolt of Polish-Lithuanian forces against the Russian occupiers. Captured during the revolt, he was ultimately pardoned by Russia's Paul I and lived the remainder of his life as an international celebrity and a vocal proponent for human rights. Thomas Jefferson, with whom Kosciuszko had an ongoing correspondence on the immorality of slaveholding, called him "as pure a son of liberty as I have ever known." A lifelong bachelor with a knack for getting involved in doomed relationships, Kosciuszko navigated the tricky worlds of royal intrigue and romance while staying true to his ultimate passion—the pursuit of freedom for all. This definitive and exhaustively researched biography fills a long-standing gap in historical literature with its account of a dashing and inspiring revolutionary figure.
From 1915 to 1935 the inventive community of social scientists at the University of Chicago pioneered empirical research and a variety of qualitative and quantitative methods, shaping the future of twentieth-century American sociology and related fields as well. Martin Bulmer's history of the Chicago school of sociology describes the university's role in creating research-based and publication-oriented graduate schools of social science. "This is an important piece of work on the history of sociology, but it is more than merely historical: Martin Bulmer's undertaking is also to explain why historical events occurred as they did, using potentially general theoretical ideas. He has studied what he sees as the period, from 1915 to 1935, when the 'Chicago School' most flourished, and defines the nature of its achievements and what made them possible . . . It is likely to become the indispensible historical source for its topic."—Jennifer Platt, Sociology