Author: Edward R. KantowiczPublisher:
ISBN: 9780226423791
Category : Chicago (Ill.)
Languages : en
Pages : 260
Book Description
Polish-American Politics in Chicago, 1888-1940
Author: Edward R. KantowiczPublisher:
ISBN: 9780226423791
Category : Chicago (Ill.)
Languages : en
Pages : 260
Book Description
Polish-American Politics in Chicago, 1880-1940
Author: Edward R. KantowiczPublisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226423807
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 284
Book Description
The "new immigrants" who came from southern and eastern Europe at the turn of the century have rarely been the subject of detailed scholarly examination. In particular, Poles and other Slavic groups have usually been written about in a filiopietist manner. Edward Kantowicz fills this gap with his incisive work on Poles in Chicago. Kantowicz examines such questions as why Chicago, with the largest Polish population of any city outside of Poland, has never elected a Polish mayor. The author also examines the origins of the heavily Democratic allegiance of Polish voters. Kantowicz demonstrates that Chicago Poles were voting Democratic long before Al Smith, Franklin Roosevelt, or the New Deal. Kantowicz has made extensive use of registration lists and voting records to construct a statistical picture of Polish-American voting behavior in Chicago. He draws on church records and census records to provide a detailed description of Chicago's many Polish neighborhoods. He also has studied the city's Polish-language press as well as the few manuscript collections left by Polish-American politicians. These collections, together with data gleaned from interviews with individuals who were acquainted with these figures, are used to sketch profiles of the political leaders of Polonia's capital. Kantowicz focuses on the goals which the Polish-American community pursued in politics, the issues they deemed important, and the functions which politics served for them. He links this analysis to observations on the homeland and the reasons for which the Poles emigrated. In this context he is able to draw conclusions about the nature of the ethnic politics in general. His work will appeal to a variety of readers: urban and twentieth-century historians, political scientists, and sociologists.
A History of the Polish Americans
Author: John.J. BukowczykPublisher: Routledge
ISBN: 135153520X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 378
Book Description
In the last, rootless decade families, neighborhoods, and communities have disintegrated in the face of gripping social, economic, and technological changes. Th is process has had mixed results. On the positive side, it has produced a mobile, volatile, and dynamic society in the United States that is perhaps more open, just, and creative than ever before. On the negative side, it has dissolved the glue that bound our society together and has destroyed many of the myths, symbols, values, and beliefs that provided social direction and purpose. In A History of the Polish Americans, John J. Bukowczyk provides a thorough account of the Polish experience in America and how some cultural bonds loosened, as well as the ways in which others persisted.
Polish American History before 1939
Author: Adam WalaszekPublisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000963993
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 495
Book Description
The history of private lives of the first and second generations of Polish immigrants in the United States is viewed from the perspective of migrants themselves. What did the migrants do? How did they behave? How protagonists (men, women, children) with their own words presented their experience? Their experience is compared with one of the other groups. The book discusses migration processes, formation of neighborhoods, experiences at work, daily and family lives, functioning of parishes and tensions related to it, and construction of people’s identities and their constant reformulations. Migrants created mutual-aid societies, which played not only economic, but also ideological and political roles. Experiences of immigrants’ children at home and at school are presented, mostly in their own words and from their own perspective. Cultural activities reflect constant changes of groups’ self-identity. The book also depicts the relations between the Polish migrants and members of other ethnic groups – in the streets, public spaces, politics, and within the Catholic church. People lived in pluri-cultural, culturally diverse, contexts, and thus relations with “the others” were complex. The panorama ended in the year 1939, when after the Great Depression, the group entered into a new period of transformation during the war.
East Central Europe
Author: Lawrence D. OrtonPublisher:
ISBN:
Category : Czechoslovakia
Languages : en
Pages : 68
Book Description
Multiculturalism in the United States
Author: John D. BuenkerPublisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 0313062730
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 456
Book Description
Interest in ethnic studies and multiculturalism has grown considerably in the years since the 1992 publication of the first edition of this work. Co-editors Ratner and Buenker have revised and updated the first edition of Multiculturalism in the United States to reflect the changes, patterns, and shifts in immigration showing how American culture affects immigrants and is affected by them. Common topics that helped determine the degree and pace of acculturation for each ethnic group are addressed in each of the 17 essays, providing the reader with a comparative reference tool. Seven new ethnic groups are included: Arabs, Haitians, Vietnamese, Koreans, Filipinos, Asian Indians, and Dominicans. New essays on the Irish, Chinese, and Mexicans are provided as are revised and updated essays on the remaining groups from the first edition. The contribution to American culture by people of these diverse origins reflects differences in class, occupation, and religion. The authors explain the tensions and conflicts between American culture and the traditions of newly arrived immigrants. Changes over time that both of the cultures brought to America and of the culture that received them is also discussed. Essays on representative ethnic groups include African-Americans, American Indians, Arabs, Asian Indians, Chinese, Dominicans, Filipinos, Germans, Haitians, Irish, Italians, Jews, Koreans, Mexicans, Poles, Scandinavians, and the Vietnamese.
Beyond the Uprising
Author: Cynthia Grant BowmanPublisher: Xlibris Corporation
ISBN: 1469103699
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 189
Book Description
Cynthia Grant Bowman is a professor of law at Cornell Law School in Ithaca, New York. She met the subject of this biography, Maria Chudzinski, while teaching at Northwestern University School of Law in Chicago, where Maria worked in the international section of the law library. Maria was born in Poland before the German invasion and the Second World War and joined the underground resistance, or Home Army, as a teenager. She fought during the 1944 Warsaw Uprising and was taken prisoner by the Germans when the city fell. In 1945 Maria moved to England, where she was a member of the Polish Air Force, ultimately settling in Chicago in 1952. She has been very active in the Polish-American community in Chicago since that time. Intrigued by Marias past, Professor Bowman asked her to tell her story. This book is the result.
Mr. Chairman
Author: James L. MerrinerPublisher: SIU Press
ISBN: 9780809324736
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 364
Book Description
The story of Dan Rostenkowski's rise and fall provides one of the keys to how power is sought, won, exercised, and distributed in contemporary America, argues political journalist James L. Merriner. A literal son of the Chicago political machine, Rostenkowski was installed in politics by his father, Alderman Joseph P. Rostenkowski, and by his mentor, Mayor Richard I. Daley. In his thirty-six year congressional career, he served nine presidents, forming close friendships with many of them. His legislative masterpiece was the 1986 tax reform law. Eight years later, he was indicted on federal charges for misusing tax dollars and campaign funds. In his dealings with the man who tumbled dramatically from his high position as chair of the powerful House Ways and Means Committee all the way down to a cell in a federal prison in Wisconsin, Merriner finds Rostenkowski candid, straightforward, and authentic-- "except when it came to his own finances." Rostenkowski is not a complex man in need of psychoanalysis on the part of his biographer, and Merriner does not indulge in much of that. Purely, simply, and openly, Rostenkowski wanted power. He wanted wealth. He got both, and Merriner shows us how. Merriner sees mythic qualities in Rostenkowski, characterizing him as the "tall bold slugger" of Carl Sandburg's 1916 poem about Chicago. Noting that this master politician climbed to fantastic peaks only to fall hard and fast, Merriner points out that "Rostenkowski's life ascended from power in the political science sense to tragedy in the classical sense." The Justice Department and the electorate sacrificed Rostenkowski as an embodiment of the excesses of big government. Like the Greek chorus of tragedy, major media reported the scandal to the masses. Yet Merriner does not strain to make his subject fit a classical mold. He tells instead the "story of a great man who was also a little man, a statesman and a crook, an emotional man, an American original." This was also a man unbeaten by his troubles, a man who emerged from prison unabashed. This illustrated biography is not authorized by Rostenkowski, who declined Merriner's interview requests after June 1995. His sources are the public record, previous interviews with Rostenkowski and with many other sources before and after 1995, and his own political acumen gained from decades on the political scene.
Experts and Politicians
Author: Kenneth FinegoldPublisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691221634
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 275
Book Description
During the Progressive Era, reform candidates in New York, Cleveland, and Chicago challenged the status quo--with strikingly different results: brief triumph in New York, sustained success in Cleveland, and utter failure in Chicago. Kenneth Finegold seeks to explain this phenomenon by analyzing the support for reform in these cities, especially the role of an emerging class of urban policy professionals in each campaign. His work offers a new way of looking at urban reform opposition to machine politics. Drawing on original research and quantitative analysis of electoral data, Finegold identifies three distinct patterns of support for reform candidates: traditional reformers drew support from native-stock elites; municipal populists found support among stock immigrant groups and segments of the working class; and progressive candidates won the backing of coalitions made up of traditional reform and municipal populist voters. The success of these reform efforts, Finegold shows, depended on the different ways in which experts were incorporated into city politics. This book demonstrates the significance of expertise as a potential source of change in American politics and policy, and of each city's electoral and administrative organizations as mediating institutions within a national system of urban political economies.
The Revolution of ’28
Author: Robert ChilesPublisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501714198
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 299
Book Description
The Revolution of ’28 explores the career of New York governor and 1928 Democratic presidential nominee Alfred E. Smith. Robert Chiles peers into Smith’s work and uncovers a distinctive strain of American progressivism that resonated among urban, ethnic, working-class Americans in the early twentieth century. The book charts the rise of that idiomatic progressivism during Smith’s early years as a state legislator through his time as governor of the Empire State in the 1920s, before proceeding to a revisionist narrative of the 1928 presidential campaign, exploring the ways in which Smith’s gubernatorial progressivism was presented to a national audience. As Chiles points out, new-stock voters responded enthusiastically to Smith's candidacy on both economic and cultural levels. Chiles offers a historical argument that describes the impact of this coalition on the new liberal formation that was to come with Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal, demonstrating the broad practical consequences of Smith’s political career. In particular, Chiles notes how Smith’s progressive agenda became Democratic partisan dogma and a rallying point for policy formation and electoral success at the state and national levels. Chiles sets the record straight in The Revolution of ’28 by paying close attention to how Smith identified and activated his emergent coalition and put it to use in his campaign of 1928, before quickly losing control over it after his failed presidential bid.