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Chicago was once known as the "Second Croatian Capital." Lured by economic, political, and social freedoms, Croatians, like other immigrants, came to Chicago in search of the American dream. The first documented groups settled mainly in Pilsen, Bridgeport, and the South Side in the late 1800s. By the turn of the century, these immigrants toiled in Chicago's steel mills, meatpacking plants, and construction sites. They soon formed social groups, churches, schools, Croatian-language newspapers, and other infrastructure needed to support the expanding community. Today there are more than 150,000 descendants of Croatian heritage in the Chicagoland area, and many of the foundations built by the forefathers continue to service the community. Ivan Metrovic ́'s "Indian" sculptures still adorn Congress Parkway and Michael Bilandic ́ remains in the history books as the only Croatian mayor of Chicago. Croatians of Chicagoland examines how this community and its leaders, clergy, laborers, politicians, athletes, benevolent societies, and social organizations helped build and shape Chicago's history.
This encyclopedia is a unique collection of entries covering the arrival, adaptation, and integration of immigrants into American culture from the 1500s to 2010. Few topics inspire such debate among American citizens as the issue of immigration in the United States. Yet, it is the steady influx of foreigners into America over 400 years that has shaped the social character of the United States, and has favorably positioned this country for globalization. Immigrants in American History: Arrival, Adaptation, and Integration is a chronological study of the migration of various ethnic groups to the United States from 1500 to the present day. This multivolume collection explores dozens of immigrant populations in America and delves into major topical issues affecting different groups across time periods. For example, the first author of the collection profiles African Americans as an example of the effects of involuntary migrations. A cross-disciplinary approach—derived from the contributions of leading scholars in the fields of history, sociology, cultural development, economics, political science, law, and cultural adaptation—introduces a comparative analysis of customs, beliefs, and character among groups, and provides insight into the impact of newcomers on American society and culture.
Publisher Description
A middle class, Midwestern family in search of meaning uproot themselves and move to their ancestral village in Croatia. "We can look at this in two ways," Jim wrote, always the pragmatist. "We can panic and scrap the whole idea. Or we can take this as a sign. They're saying the economy is going to get worse before it gets better. Maybe this is the kick in the pants we needed to do something completely different. There will always be an excuse not to go..." And that, friends, is how a typically sane middle-aged mother decided to drag her family back to a forlorn mountain village in the backwoods of Croatia. So begins author Jennifer Wilson's journey in Running Away to Home. Jen, her architect husband, Jim, and their two children had been living the typical soccer- and ballet-practice life in the most Middle American of places: Des Moines, Iowa. They overindulged themselves and their kids, and as a family they were losing one another in the rush of work, school, and activities. One day, Jen and her husband looked at each other–both holding their Starbucks coffee as they headed out to their SUV in the mall parking lot, while the kids complained about the inferiority of the toys they just got–and asked themselves: "Is this the American dream? Because if it is, it sort of sucks." Jim and Jen had always dreamed of taking a family sabbatical in another country, so when they lost half their savings in the stock-market crash, it seemed like just a crazy enough time to do it. High on wanderlust, they left the troubled landscape of contemporary America for the Croatian mountain village of Mrkopalj, the land of Jennifer's ancestors. It was a village that seemed hermetically sealed for the last one hundred years, with a population of eight hundred (mostly drunken) residents and a herd of sheep milling around the post office. For several months they lived like locals, from milking the neighbor's cows to eating roasted pig on a spit to desperately seeking the village recipe for bootleg liquor. As the Wilson-Hoff family struggled to stay sane (and warm), what they found was much deeper and bigger than themselves.
"American-born Catherine knows little of her Croatian mother's early life. When Marijana dies of ovarian cancer, twenty-two-year-old Catherine finds herself cut off from the past she never really knew. As Catherine searches for clues to her mother's elusive history, she discovers that Marijana was orphaned during WWII, nearly died as a teenager, and escaped from Communist Yugoslavia to Rome, and then South America. Through travel and memory, history and imagination, Catherine resurrects the relatives she's never known. Traversing time and place, memoir and novel, this lyrical narrative explores the collective memory between mothers and daughters, and what it means to find wholeness. It is a story where a daughter gives voice to her immigrant mother's unspoken history, and in the process, heals them both."--Amazon.com.
This volume continues the story of the cultural and political history of the Croatian people who have long been noted for their significant contributions to the arts and the humanities. It examines the Croatian language, literature to 1835, the maritime history of the eastern Adriatic, Croatian political history from 1526 to 1918, the development of book printing, the ethnic and religious history of Bosnia and Hercegovina, the cultural achievement of Bosnian and Hercegovinian Muslims, and Croatian immigrants in North America. Each of the nine chapters in the book is written by a specialist and is accompanied by an extensive bibliography. Other special features of this volume are eleven historical maps of the region, a geographical map, sixteen pages of illustrations, and a glossary of geographical names. This reference work will be invaluable to libraries, and will be a useful source of information for historians, writers on Central European affairs, students of art and ethnic developments, and the layman interested in the Croatian people and their cultural history.