Introduction: Polish Chicago
1 Meet Me at the Fair: Poland’s Fourth Partition
2 Settling In: Creating Polonia’s Capital
3 Living in Polish Chicago, 1880–1920
4 World War One: A Turning Point
5 Interwar Polonia: Years of Stress and Change
6 Apocalypse Again: World War Two and Its Aftermath
7 The Lost Struggle: Chicago’s Polonia, Communist Poland, and a Changing City
8 A New Polonia
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
Notable Book of 2019 | Chicago Tribune
“American Warsaw is something new and necessary, a book Chicago didn’t know it needed until it showed up. American Warsaw chronicles the unique nature of Chicago’s ‘Polonia’—its community of Poles and Polish descendants outside of Poland. Pacyga tells the story of how Chicago came to have such a large Polish population, and to even be considered a part of Poland in exile, the ‘fourth partition’ of a country that had been divided between Prussia, Austria and Russia before 1918. Chicago was ‘Poland elsewhere,’ where immigrants juggled becoming American with trying to hang on to their sense of Polishness, or polskość.”
Newcity
“There’s probably not a person in the United States—and certainly not in Chicago—more qualified than Dominic Pacyga to document the path Poland’s citizens took in emigrating to the United States. . . . Through tireless research, Pacyga develops a perhaps unintended thesis: that the current issues of the immigrant in Chicago and in the United States have been played out in cycles over the last century-and-a-half. . . . It’s haunting to discover in American Warsaw that history and language have repeated themselves. The Poles at the beginning of the twentieth century are now the Mexicans, Central Americans, Ethiopians and Syrians in Chicago a century later.”
James S. Pula, author of Polish Americans: An Ethnic Community
“The dean of Chicago historians has fashioned an exceptionally clear, yet nuanced interpretation of one of the city’s largest ethnic groups. American Warsaw is much more than the story of an ethnic community. It is a clearly written, insightful investigation of the internal and external forces that shaped the development of Polish Chicago, its relationship to the broader urban area, and its interaction with its ancestral homeland.”
Anna D. Jaroszynska-Kirchmann, author of The Polish Hearst: Ameryka-Echo and the Public Role of the Immigrant Press
“This highly readable story of Chicago’s Polonia could only have been written by an accomplished social and urban historian, who, as a born and bred Chicagoan, also knows the city in an organic way. Basing his account on the wealth of his previous research, Pacyga presents a comprehensive portrait of an important ethnic community seen through its organizational activities as well as everyday lived experience. American Warsaw, set against the backdrop of both American and Poland’s history, tells the story from the earliest decades of Polish immigration to the United States to the most recent period.”
June Sawyers | Third Coast Review
"American Warsaw seamlessly tells the story of Polish Chicago and Poland itself.To try to explain one without the other would tell half a story, notes Pacyga...A Polish-American himself, his family arrived in pre-World War I Chicago, settling in the Back of the Yards neighborhood where family members stayed for three generations and spoke their own brand of Chicago Polish patois...Having such a rich background makes American Warsaw an even more bracing history of Polish Chicago."
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