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Who are the Romani people? -- Romani society -- Customs and traditions -- The Romani language -- The Roms among the nations -- Between romanticism and racism -- A modern Romani identity -- Appendix: The mosaic of Romani groups.
The Gypsies portrayed in this book are the Vlax-speaking Rom, the largest group of Gypsies in the United States, numbering 500,000. Not officially recognized as a minority in the U.S. until 1972, Gypsies have led an almost entirely invisible existence here. Now in this fascinating workthe first complete account of American GypsiesSutherland has produced an in-depth look at the full range of everyday social life among the Rom. Separate, elusive, complex, and unique among the people of the world, Gypsies have preserved their traditional way of life. How have they avoided assimilation? What keeps them apart? How are they organized, and what do they believe? These and other important questions about these hidden Americans are addressed in Sutherlands contemporary study.
This book provides an understanding of Gypsies and Travellers by introducing the reader to the richness of their culture and lifestyle.
The A to Z of the Gypsies (Romanies) seeks to end such prejudice by clarifying the facts about this nomadic people. Through a chronology, an introductory essay, a bibliography, and hundreds of cross-referenced dictionary entries on significant persons, places, events, institutions, and aspects of culture, society, economy, and politics, the history of the Gypsies and their culture is told.
This book of interdisciplinary readings on Gypsies is sensitive to the Romani point of view and avoids exoticizing or patronizing the Gypsies and their culture. Recurrent themes in the readings include: the historical oppression of the Gypsies including contemporary xenophobia and violence; the nonstatic, heterogeneous nature of Gypsy cultures; the persistence of racist stereotypes; and personal and institutional Gypsy/non-Gypsy relationships. Nearly all of the classic essays updated for this volume tell stories of the persistance of the Roma in the face of savage atrocities and appalling living conditions.
Originating in India, the Gypsies arrived in Europe around the 14th century, spreading not only across the entirety of the continent but also immigrating to the Americas. The first Gypsy migration included farmworkers, blacksmiths, and mercenary soldiers, as well as musicians, fortune-tellers, and entertainers. At first, they were generally welcome as an interesting diversion to the dull routine of that period. Soon, however, they attracted the antagonism of the governing powers, as they have continually done throughout the following centuries. The A to Z of the Gypsies (Romanies) seeks to end such prejudice by clarifying the facts about this nomadic people. Through a chronology, an introductory essay, a bibliography, and hundreds of cross-referenced dictionary entries on significant persons, places, events, institutions, and aspects of culture, society, economy, and politics, the history of the Gypsies and their culture is told.
David Crowe draws from previously untapped East European, Russian, and traditional sources to explore the life, history, and culture of the Gypsies, or Roma, from their entrance into the region in the Middle Ages until the present.
It is, I believe, seldom observed that the world is so far from having quitted the romantic or sentimental for the purely scientific that, even in science itself, whatever is best set forth owes half its charm to something delicately and distantly reflected from the forbidden land of fancy. The greatest reasoners and writers on the driest topics are still “genial,” because no man ever yet had true genius who did not feel the inspiration of poetry, or mystery, or at least of the unusual. We are not rid of the marvelous or curious, and, if we have not yet a science of curiosities, it is apparently because it lies for the present distributed about among the other sciences, just as in small museums illuminated manuscripts are to be found in happy family union with stuffed birds or minerals, and with watches and snuff-boxes, once the property of their late majesties the Georges. Until such a science is formed, the new one of ethnology may appropriately serve for it, since it of all presents most attraction to him who is politely called the general reader, but who should in truth be called the man who reads the most for mere amusement. For Ethnology deals with such delightful material as primeval kumbo-cephalic skulls, and appears to her votaries arrayed, not in silk attire, but in strange fragments of leather from ancient Irish graves, or in cloth from Lacustrine villages. She glitters with the quaint jewelry of the first Italian race, whose ghosts, if they wail over the “find,” “speak in a language man knows no more.” She charms us with etchings or scratchings of mammoths on mammoth-bone, and invites us to explore mysterious caves, to picnic among megalithic monuments, and speculate on pictured Scottish stones. In short, she engages man to investigate his ancestry, a pursuit which presents charms even to the illiterate, and asks us to find out facts concerning works of art which have interested everybody in every age. Ad interim, before the science of curiosities is segregated from that of ethnology, I may observe that one of the marvels in the latter is that, among all the subdivisions of the human race, there are only two which have been, apparently from their beginning, set apart, marked and cosmopolite, ever living among others, and yet reserved unto themselves. These are the Jew and the gypsy. From time whereof history hath naught to the contrary, the Jew was, as he himself holds in simple faith, the first man. Red Earth, Adam, was a Jew, and the old claim to be a peculiar people has been curiously confirmed by the extraordinary genius and influence of the race, and by their boundless wanderings. Go where we may, we find the Jew—has any other wandered so far? Yes, one. For wherever Jew has gone, there, too, we find the gypsy. The Jew may be more ancient, but even the authentic origin of the Romany is lost in ancient Aryan record, and, strictly speaking, his is a prehistoric caste. Among the hundred and fifty wandering tribes of India and Persia, some of them Turanian, some Aryan, and others mixed, it is of course difficult to identify the exact origin of the European gypsy. One thing we know: that from the tenth to the twelfth century, and probably much later on, India threw out from her northern half a vast multitude of very troublesome indwellers. What with Buddhist, Brahman, and Mohammedan wars,—invaders outlawing invaded,—the number of out-castes became alarmingly great. To these the Jats, who, according to Captain Burton, constituted the main stock of our gypsies, contributed perhaps half their entire nation. Excommunication among the Indian professors of transcendental benevolence meant social death and inconceivable cruelty. Now there are many historical indications that these outcasts, before leaving India, became gypsies, which was the most natural thing in a country where such classes had already existed in very great numbers from early times.